AMUSEMENTS

Northern Advocate, 9 January 1936, Page 5

AMUSEMENTS

REGENT PROGRAMME KARLOFF AND LUGOSI. Remembering “Dracula” with its lurid vampire, and the monster in “Frankenstein,” patrons of the Regent’s current programme “The Raven,” with Karloff (Frankenstein) and Bela Lugosi (Dracula), will see something doubly terrifying. Others in the cast are Irene Ware, Lester Matthews and Inez Courtney.

Lugosi is a mad doctor, so steeped in the works of Edgar Allen Poe, that at times he seems to re-live some of Poe’s strange characters. He saves the life of lovely Irene Ware and falls desperately ,in love with her. While she is under his care, he casts a spell over her which makes her subservient to his will to a certain degree. He is never quite able to command her love, however. Karloff is a notorious criminal, so hounded by the police, that he comes to Lugosi and begs him to so change his features as to make him unrecognisable. Lugosi agrees, providing Karloff will carry out a diabolical plan Lugosi has in mind. He purposely makes a mess of the job and the criminal comes out of the operating room with a horrible countenance. Lugosi invites Irene and her friends to a week-end party. Lugosi, ■ in his madness, has conceived a terrible punishment for Irene because she has refused his love and has shown a preference for Lester Matthews. Karloff knows of Lugosi’s plan and decides to save the girl himself. Karloff is shot by Lugosi, who is then caught in his own trap as the walls of the torture chamber close down upon him.

PLAZA S DOUBLE BILL. The problem of a man over 40 who finds himself in love with a girl half his age is faced by Herbert Marshall in “Accent on Youth,” one of the two splendid films showing at the Plaza Theatre. The story abounds in bright and clever dialogue, and the acting, especially that of Marshall, is first class. Marshall, unable to tell his secretary how much he loves her, gives her the leading role in his play, written about just such a life situation as he faces. Watching her falling in love with the youthful and handsome leading man, Marshall has mixed feelings. As a dramatist, he is satisfied with the working out of his plot in life, but as a man, he is unhappy at the prospect of losing her. Because Reed, who plays the part of the leading man, is awkward in his approach, Marshall coaches him in making love and the girl finally accepts the hand of her youthful suitor. But that does not end this pungently i humorous story. In the witty and amusing final sequences, these three extricate themselves from their romantic probfems in a totally unexi pectcd manner.

W. C. Fields reaches the top of his form as a comedian and pantomimist in the second picture, "Man on the Flying Trapeze.” An amusing and quite plausible story carries him from one uproarious incident to another. This time he is cast as a downtrodden, submissive husband persistently nagged by his wife and mother-in-law, consistently supported in his scrapes by his daughter, Mary Brian. At the office he is a memory expert clerk for a woollen manufacturer. The action centres principally about Fields’ efforts to attend a wrestling match. Unfortunately, his petty young brother-in-law steals his ticket while the comedian, in one of his famous retiring scenes, has gone to the cellar to investigate the presence

of burglars in the house. His troubles begin at once, from the moment he is gaoled instead of the housebreakers, to the time he gets to the fight after the boss gives him the afternoon off to attend his mother-in-law’s "funeral.”