ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 217, 12 August 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

KOSY THEATRE. “SWISS MISS.” Laurel and Hardy reach a new peak of comedy in an Alpine setting, climbing to dizzy heights of mirth in “Swiss Miss,” their now musical film. Their efforts to sell mouse trax>s to cheese producers, including demonstrations of tho devices, all of which in ingenuity would do credit to Rube Goldberg, are sequences as hilarious as have ever come to the screen. In success or in despair, their reactions never fail to hie the bell of pure and unadulterated comedy. Romance enters the picture in tlie persons of Della Lind and AValter Woolf King. Th’cir vocal numbers are well above the average and the music written especially for this production by Phil Chraig possesses warmth and melodic appeal. Miss Lind, dainty and blonde, is a Viennese star of stage and. screen who is making her American debut in “Swiss Miss.”

A scintillating new comedy -team comes in the Kosy Theatre to-day in “Lucky Night,” in which Myrna Loy and Robert Taylor make their first appearance together beiore the cameras. Interweaving moving heart throbs with uproarious laughter, tho story unfolds the accidental meeting and later marital careers of Cora Jordan and Bill Overton. Cora, the spoiled daughter of a millionaire steel magnate walks out on her fourth engagement to hunt for a job. Bill is a playboy down on his luck. Following an accidental meeting on a park bench, they gamble, frolic and fight thenway to fortune, get married, quarrel over tho family budget, separate and come together again after a series of mad-as-march-iiaro complications as hilarious as they are novel. 3 METEOR~THEATRE. “BLACK FRIDAY.” That rarest of all screen commodities, a new formula for making movies, is credited to Arthur Lubin, jmung Universal director. Lublin’s formula is" to make a horror picture without being horrid, and ho has achieved it in “Black Friday,” the new Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi thriller now at the Meteor Theatre. First step in the process was to present Karloff and Lugosi as “themselves,” that is, without the weird make-up effects they have used in previous horror films. Lubin did this through his story, -a screenplay by Kurt Siodinak and Eric Taylor, which depends on dramatic situations for its horror rather than on shadowy lighting, sliding panels, hunchbacks, heavy makeup and low-key organ music. The story takes place in such un-horrid locales as a college campus, a New York hotel and a swanky night club, complete with chorines. Through these familiar scenes move a strange group of people whose lives are entangled when Karloff, a surgeon, transplants part of the brain of a criminal into tho brain of a mild little professor. Stanley Ridges plays tho professor who becomes a ruthless killer, engaging in the startling total of ten murders. Lugosi is a master criminal, while others in the cast are Anne Nagel, Anne Gwynne, James Craig, Edmund MacDonald, Virginia Brissac and Paul Fix.