‘JOURNEYS END”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1043, 6 August 1930, Page 15

‘JOURNEYS END”

COMING TO THE REGENT One cf the severall things about “Journey's End” as a drama is its lack of profanity. A play in which all tho characters are men—in which they are all soldiers, if you please,, and probably less wearing in it than any talking picture yet produced. “Journey’s End,” coming to the New Regent Theatre on Thursday, was written by R. C. Sherriff without profanity—and it did not get inserted in Hollywood, despite the success of “What Price Glory?” and “The CockEyed World.” “Journey’s End” is a story of men who have gotten beyond the need of blasphemy. The war—their unnatural life, their nerve tension, their incessant danger—has taken the edge off the most virile cures. The superlative—and that’s what profanity is—is not half so forceful to these warriors as the simplest of words. For instance, Colin Clive’s line to the Colonel, “How awfully nice if the Brigadier’s pleased,” is so much more heavily freighted with meaning than any cursing. This man with his heart torn to bits over the loss of his best friend and his best officer, can express his agony most succinctly in the biting sarcasm of those simple lines, repeated again when lie says, “Still it'll be awfully nice if the Brigadier’s pleased!” Edgar Waite, in the San Francisco “Examiner,” said of “Journey’s End”: “It’s deeper than mere profanity. It’s .the pathetic tormenting of men caught in a trap, of nerves, physical and mental exhaustion, the hope and the terror of oblivion and with it all the determination to keep bucked up.” “Journey’s End” has played throughout the world to capacity audiences that listen to this all-dialogue TiffanyGainsborough picture in hushed awe.