ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXI, Issue 143, 19 May 1941, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

Meteor Theatre.— -Romance, adventure and a star-studded cast arc tlio unbeatable ingredients that make up Warner Bros.’ new film, *‘The Road to ’Brisco,” showing at the Meteor Theatre to-day. Featuring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino and Huinplney Bogart ir. an ull-tstar cast, the swiftly paced film pack* plenty of laughs, love and excitement. Joe Fabrini, played by George Raft, is a cold blooded t’eliow who thinks there isn’t a girl in the world who can get him to fall for her. He laughs at his brother, played by Humphrey Bogart, when he tells how he would like to have a job that allowed him to have his evenings free to spend with his wife (Gale Page’s role). Bogart is bitterly resentful of the fact that his work allows him to catch only occasional glimpses of his wife and i* tortured when other girls remind him of her. Joe always claimed that he did not go in for that romantic stuff. At least lie thought he did not until he met a waitress, played by Ann Sheridan. Ann gives a deeply moving portrayal of a girl whose sentimentality is hidden behind flippant, wisecracks. And Raft is great as the fellow who lct«s neither her wisecracks nor her love go unanswered.

Regent Theatre. —ln the tradition of the great stage and film success “The Luck of the Navy,” which played long seasons in the war of 1914-18, is the M-G-M British film “Contraband,” a rattling good thriller, full of the fang of the sea. Swiftly the action changes from contraband detection methods by the Royal Navy in the English Channel to pulse-quickening encounters with a nest of Nazi ."pies, concealed in the night haunts of wartime London, following the outbreak of war in 1939. Stark realism is the keynote of the film in consequence of the assistance given the British National-Amorican producers by the Royal Navy. The actual methods employed in blockade running, as the Navy keeps its vigil in the Channel, are faithfully and thrillingly portrayed. As the story unfolds in the fashionable sec-' tion of London, scenes in the completely blacked-out streets, hazardous with a torrent of traffic, add a note ut authenticity. Tall, handsome Conrad Yeidt, as Captain Andersen, skipper of a Danish liner, plays convincingly the part of an adventurous seafarer following a beautiful British girl spy into the coils of underground Nazidom.