TALKIES THIS WEEK

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 639, 16 April 1929, Page 11

TALKIES THIS WEEK

: NEW SCREEN WONDERS 3 I. 3 MR. HAYWARD EXPLAINS ’ After, waiting long and impatiently l for tire appearance of the new screen f entertainment that is sweeping the ’ world, Aucklanders are to be rewarded this week. “Talkies” —sound and talking pictures —are coming. Talkie programmes open at the Regent and Strand Theatres on Thursday evening. ! “Talkies,” as applied to the radical _ change which has come to the moving J picture, is a misnomer, for in the new , entertainment, for the ear as well as : the eye, the majority of units making up the programme do not talk, says Mi% Henry Hayward. 1 “I would like New Zealanders to understand clearly what they are 1 going to see and hear when the new entertainment appears. “We do not desire anyone to come to the picture theatres under any mist conception as to the entertainment s which will he offered. “There will be pictures, or parts of l pictures, that talk, but such will only ■ he a part of the whole programme of sound reproduction.” The average programme which has captured the enthusiasm of Australia 1 is made up of the following variations of “See and Hear” items: —- Synchronised overtures and seiec- ■ tions by the great orchestras of the Roxy and Paramount Theatres of New York. Pictorial gazettes reflecting life and the world’s happenings, with their natural sounds, such as the traffic of great cities, the vocal enthusiasm of a football match, human speech at functions and the multitude of nature’s sounds, from the crashing ocean waves to the sighing of the wind in the tree-tops. Short pictorial units of great personalities of the world. Speeches by his Majesty the King, Mussolini, Lloyd George, Bernard Shaw; also the greatest artists in opera and vaudeville, -tf-ith talk and song. Talking comedies, usually about 20 minutes in duration. A long feature picture: These major films which close the entire presentation are individually different from a sound point of view. Some are with exquisitely fitted orchestral accompaniment and songs only; others, with the Roxy Theatre orchestra, singing lilts and some dialogue in high dramatic spots, and again, others are “all talkies” with softened harmonies of song and strings as an intermittent background. The new sound and sight screen is a modern miracle, a true, marriage of the senses of seeing and hearing, blossoming with wondrous scenes, song and speech—and we are all lucky to be alive and greet its birth. Yet we must not forget it is a child barely two years old, and Is far from that perfection, which time and experi■ence will bring it to. Many of us remember the silent picture in its earliest years, when it , was the Cinderella of entertainment. , To-day our Cinderella has been ac- 1 claimed in every country. Its baby sister, “The Talkie Screen,” i has arrived. Do not be captiously critical. Remember its youth. It c has yet much to learn. Ever in our c midst are “knockers” of anything new. ] old and young fogies who are always looking backward at the setting sun. ; r