NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1025, 16 July 1930, Page 16

NEW REGENT

“CONDEMNED” ON FRIDAY Leila Hyams, who played opposite William Haines in the never-to-be-forgotten “Alias Jimy Valentine," is again opposite the popular star in “The Girl Said No," his latest all-talking vehicle for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Polly Moran and Marie Dressier, noted comedy pair, are Haines’s coconspirators in the matter of getting laughs. The second attraction on the same programme is an intensely powerful drama starring Ann Harding, and entitled “Her Private Affair.” Samuel Goldwyn, noted motion picture producer, has a theory that one of the main troubles with the film art has always been a lack of earnestness and artistic ability on the part of the authors of its stories. It was Mr. Goldwyn who, in an effort to correct this deficiency, brought about the first great emigration of internationally famous authors to Hollywood ten years ago, and it is Mr. Goldwyn again who has been the luckiest of all in the current scramble for the services of great writers for the talking pictures. “Condemned,” his new starring picture for Ronald Colman, which comes to the New Regent Theatre on Friday, is an excellent example. -Tt is adapted from the best-selling novel of a year ago, “Condemned to Devil’s Island,” by Blair Niles, internationally famous woman writer on racial and sociological geography. The adaptation was done by none other than Sidney Howard, one of the most prominent of the younger generation of American playwrights, winner of the Pulitzer Prize some years ago with his play, “They Knew What They Wanted.” Mrs. Niles worked directly with Mr. Howard on the adaptation, and came away from Hollywood completely convinced that every movie does not spoil the book it is taken from. “Condemned to Devil’s Island” is universally acknowledged to be Mrs. Niles’s masterpiece, being a tremendously vivid picture of the life of the thousands of convicts in the French Penal colonies off the coast of South America. Surrounded by sharkinfested seas and fever-haunted swamps, so that escape is impossible; filled with the incorrigible dregs of Europo sent away from France to a living death in the tropics; completely isolated from the outside world. Devil’s Island has long been an international byword for the most picturesque prison in the world. BRITANNIA, THREE LAMPS Five new song hits sung by Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell contribute much to the success of "High Society Blues,” Fox Movietone musical romance, now current at the Britannia Theatre. Joseph McCarthy and James F. Hanley wrote them. William Collier, sen., Joyce Compton, Hedda Hopper, Louise Fazenda, Lucien Littlefield, Brandon Hurst and Gregory Gaye are in the cast. David Butler directed. DANCING AT DIXIELAND The usual mid-week rarnival dance at the Dixieland Cabaret will be held there this evening, when another happy time is assured. Good music is provided by the Dixieland Dance Band.