SKATING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21278, 3 September 1932, Page 12

SKATING

Owing to the phenomenal success of tho vice-versa skating carnival at the Rivoli Rink last Tuesday evening, it will bo repeated on Tuesday, October 4. A series of humorous items will be introduced in addition.

ST. JAMES' THEATRE There is .a rich flavour of genuine melodrama about " While Paris Sleeps," the Fox production which opened a season at the St. James' Theatre last evening. It provides Mr. Victor McLaglen with one of those strong virile roles with which he has built up his considerable screen reputation, and in Miss Helen Mack it introduces a new leading lady who lias been hailed in the United States as a screen "discovery" of major importance. The film tells the story of a man who escapes from a French prison camp in the tropics, where he is serving a life sentence, and, obeying a dying request from his wife, returns to Paris to help a daughter who believes her father died a hero's death in the war. lie arrives to find that his daughter, penniless, has been thrown among the apaches of the Paris underworld. There is a crazy mosaic of narrow, twisting streets, dreaiy tenement houses, whose windows look on squalid yards, sordid bars and cabarets — the setting for men and women who live beyond the pale. And into this setting slouches the burly figure of the escaped convict to fight and rob and die for the girl who must never know that he is her father. There is power and vigour in all of Mr. McLaglen's work, and Miss Mack makes a wistful and appealing figure of the daughter, rescued from unknown perils by the sacrifice of an "unknown soldier." Mr. William Bakewell gives a capable performance as Ihe volatile Gascon, lover of the girl, and Mr. Jack La Rue's underworld apache is an appropriately sinister figure. Lighting has been used judiciously throughout the film to give sombre settings the utmost in macabre effect. The supporting programme is full of good things. Of special interest in the current issue of the Fox Movietone News are scenes of the opening of the Ottawa Conference by the Earl of Bessborongh, Governor-General of Canada, with speeches by Mr. Stanley Baldwin and Mr. R. B. Bennett. In the Australian edition there are some excellent shots of the Kerapiti Blowhole in action. There is excellent treatment in colour photography of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," one of the most interesting of modern musical compositions, played by Paul Whiteman's Concert Orchestra, an excellent piece of cinema showmanship. Then there is laughter in plenty in a burlesque of Hollywood's traditional treatment of the motor-racing track, produced by the Thalians' Club. There are some glorious scenes when a driver has hip petrol tank filled with ether, with disastrous results to competitors who get in the track of his exhaust.