ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 218, 13 August 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

KOSY THEATRE. “LITTLE TOUGH GUY.” Drama from newspaper headlines ! Right off the front page of a daily paper came the elements for one of the most important sequences in the Universal picture, “Little Tough Guy,” showing to-day at the Ivosy Theatre. The unusual screen-lPg-p/ay presents the powerful story of a youth’s struggle against the oppressive inliuenco of life in a .biff city. The famous “Dead End” kids arc featured in the cast with Robert Wilcox and Helen Parrish. In the role of a newsboy, Billy Ilalop stops to read the headlines of a newspaper lie is selling. Across the front page in bold type is the story that his father has been sentenced to the electric cliair for murder. The boy goes to the judge, and, in an emotionally charged scene, pleads for a new trial for his father. Two thousand newspapers, bearing the fatal headline were specially printed up for use in the film. They provided the fuse that touches off one of the most powerful dramatic sequences ever attempted by any young screen player. The associate feature at the Ivosy is no less a hit than the “Merry-Go-Round of 1938.” The cast includes such favourites as Misclia Auer. Louiso Fazenda, Bert Lalir, Alice Brady and Dave Apollon and his orchestra. There are plenty of tuneful songs and lots of fun for everyone. But ho stirs to see this picture right from, the start so you will catch every laugh. METEOR THEATRE. “BLACK FRIDAY.” That rarest of all screen commodities, a new formula for making movies, is credited to Arthur Lubin, young Universal director. Lublin’s formula is to make a horror picture without being horrid, and he lias achieved it in “Black Friday,” the new Boris KarlolT-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 e/focts they have used in previous horror tihns. Lubin did this through his story, a screenplay by Kurt Siodmak 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. Tile 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 the brain of a mild little professor. Stanley Ridges plays the 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,