GRAND AND LYRIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 640, 17 April 1929, Page 17

GRAND AND LYRIC

“HOMESICK” A craving for revenge on the part of the loser of his all in a poker game, an urge to get even that entails a trip across the Continent, is one of the high and hilarious spots of “Homesick,” now at the Grand and Lyric Theatres, featuring Sammy Cohen. It all starts in a pool room in New York, where Cohen, flat as a pancake, financially, reads an advertisement inserted by a girl in California who wants a husband, but said husband-to-be must have enough wherewithal to buy a chicken ranch. Likewise Sammy sees a poster advertising i a transcontinental bicycle race from New York to Los Angeles, with a prize of £5,000 for the winner. He borrows a dollar and edges into a poker room in the rear of a pool hall. This poker session lasts two days and two nights, sans interruption. Sammy emerges with enough to pay his entrance fee into the race and purchase a bicycle. The man he “took” in the poker game, Harry Sweet, also enters the race and the feud is on all the way across the Continent. The riders encounter a cattle stampede, desert hardships and a forest fire, but nothing serious ever happens. “Paradise,” a fine British film starring Betty Balfour and Alexandre D’Arcy, is the second feature.

Betty Balfour, the vivacious little British international star, having finished her latest picture, “The Daughter of the Regiment,” will shortly start work on “The Vagabond Queen,” which is from the story by Douglas Ferber, the famous author, playwright and lyric writer, who also wrote the story from which Jack Buchanan’s latest screen vehicle, “Toni.” is adapted.