ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 169, 17 June 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

KOSY THEATRE. “SOUTH OE THE BORDER.” Gene Autry, world popular singing star of the saddle, who plays the leading role in “South of the Border,” screen version of the popular song success, has topped the popularity poll among Western stars in ,Eiigland and America for the last 3 years. He is a protege of the late Will Rogers and, perhaps, the greatest compliment he has received is the fact that in the American cow. country in Texas, Oklahoma. Wyoming and Arizona, where the natives know what a cowboy really is, Autry is No. 1 favourite with the folks in these parts. , , What happens when four devoted sisters fall .in love with the same man? “Four Daughters,” the Warner Bros.’ picture based on a Fannie Hurst story, takes that as its theme and develops it into a richly human story. The four daughters of an . elderly musician all give . their hearts unanimously to a captivating young man who comes to live at their home, and ho in turn is enraptured by the youngest of them. And it is this girl, scarcely more than a child, who bravely sacrifices her own happiness because of a mistaken notion that by so doing she will ensure the happiness of her oldest sister. More by chance than by design, the tangle into which the lives of the four girls is thrown is eventually unravelled so that each achieves the destiny that makes her happiest. MAYFAIR THEATRE. “DANGER FLIGHT.” Thrills are the theme song of “Danger Flight,” tiie latest Tailspin Tommy film now showing at the Mayfair Theatre. “Danger Flight,” fourth in the Tailspin Tommy scries, dramatises the building of model aeroplanes and shows how youngsters of to-day come to love and understand aviation through models. Primarily it is the story of Tailspin Tommy’s Air Scouts, a young organisation similar to the Boy Scouts, and" tells of the regeneration of Whitey, who gives up his gang to join the Scouts of the Air. With Tommy as hi 3 guide and hero, Whitey becomes leader of the Scouts, and things are running smoothly until his gangster brother sees a chance to use the Scouts and their model ’planes to work a racket, and Whitey unwittingly helps him. A thrilling climax ensues when Tommy embarks on a mercy flight with gangsters plotting to trap him - and only Whitey and his model plane can save the flier. ■ '

“Girls on Probation,” a Warner Bros, production now screening at the Mayfair Theatre with a cast headed by Jane Bryan and Ronald Reagan, is a vivid, pulsating melodrama which also presents fairly and sympathetically —perhaps for the first time in a motion picture —the workings of the much misunderstood and often maligned system of probation. Most of the offenders granted probation are, of course, s undoubtedly guilty of the crimes of which they liave__ been convicted, but the Warner picture makes its argument for the system even more effective than it might be ordinarily by telling the story of an innocent girl 'who was being railroaded toward a prison term. STATE THEATRE. "ON THE NIGHT- OF THE FIRE.” One of the most dramatic sequences in “On the Night of the Fire,” which shows to-day at the State Theatre, shows the star Ralph Richardson walking down the dark, empty street in a windstorm, and entering the house of a man who has been trying to blackmail him. Dust is raised and swept into bis face by the wind. Old newspapers fly past him. In the distance, behind him, the sky is lit up by a fire which is ravaging, a section of the city. It is indeed tlie night of the fire —the night he chooses to kill the blackmailer. Henry Oscar plays the blackmailer who threatens to expose Richardson to the police for a theft lie lias previously committeed. The theft 1 amounted to £IOO and was the issue of a hum-drum existence and a discontented life. With this money he had hoped to give up his barber shop and start life afresh in a dreamed Utopia, but the gods decreed otherwise. A triumphant hour became a torment of agonised weeks culminating in a finale of life itself. Diana AYynyard plays opposite Richardson. The brilliant featurettes include the Battle of Narvik, showing dramatic shots actually taken in the battle waters off Norway, and showing the havoc wrought by British destroyers amongst the German Navy.