ENTERTAINMENTS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 57, Issue 4132, 2 December 1938, Page 8

ENTERTAINMENTS

REGENT THEATRE. FINAL SCREENING TO-NIGHT. "BIG CITY.” “Big City,” an original story written and produced by Norman Krasna, brilliant young New York playwright now devoting his talents to the screen, opened on Wednesday night at the Regent Theatre, with Luise Rainer and Spencer Tracy co-starred. Here is no crude attempt to reveal the machinery of a metropolis as a whole. On the contrary, it is a cunning unique story of a single slice of life in a great city and the adventures of a taxi driver in a struggle to survive. Tracy, the good priest in “San Francisco,” and later the Portuguese fisherman in "Captains Courageous,” becomes the husky-voiced cynical hackman, bold to the point of daredeviltry, fair and square and a hard man in a battle. Miss Rainer, Academy Award winner as Anna Held in “The Great Ziegfeld,” later O-Lan, the Chinese farm wife in "The Good Earth," is an immigrant girl who is the wife and soon to be the mother of his child. The story is powerful and the acting is equal to it. COMMENCING SATURDAY. “ROMANCE FOR THREE." Thrills, laughs, and spills is the keynote of “Romance for Three,” ■which opens at the Regent Theatre on Saturday. Laughs come from the plot of the escapade in the Alps. And spills are the result of the ski jump made by amateurs. The all-star com edy cast is headed by Frank Morgan, Robert Young, Mary Astor, Edna May Oliver, Florence Rice, Reginald Owen, Henry Hull and Herman Bing. Most of the snow scenes for the film were made near famous Lake Arrowhead, where the company was on location for several weeks, during tvhich every principal was required to ski. The story concerns a rich capitalist who wins his own contest for a prize slogan and goes to the Alps for two weeks as a prize. He pretends to be poor and takes his valet along to act as a rich man. His family informs the hotel that Morgan is actually rich, but they make a mistake and treat the other contest winner, Young, as the rich man. Young has been poor so long that he enjoys the mistake, and that's where the trouble starts. Miss Astor tries to vamp all three men, much to the disapproval of Miss Rice, Morgan’s daughter, who joins with his housekeeper, Miss Oliver, to put a stop to th& whole thing. The management has also arranged a particularly fine supporting programme.

EMfffiE THEATRE. FINAL SCREENING TO-NIGHT.

“LET’S MAKE A NIGHT OF IT.” What is undoubtedly ‘the largest gathering of famous jazz players ever, was filmed at Elstree, whdn over seventy well-known dance musicians appeared in a spectacular finale for the new Associated British picture, “Let’s Make a Night Of It.” Previously, it has been customary to make a complete film around one single band, but Walter Mycroft, director of productions at Associated British, decided that he wanted something much more spectacular and original for “Let’s Make a Night Of It,” so he signed up no fewer than six famous dance bands, including Jack Jackson and His Band from the Dorchester, Jack Harris of London Casino, Cafe de Paris and Embassy Club fame, Sydney Lipton from Grosvenor House, Eddie Carroll from Casani’s Club, Joo Loss from the Astoria, and Rudy Starita, to say nothing of the studio’s own band of picked musicians, under the leadership of Harry Acres. Musicians recruited from these bands appear in one of the most impressive film sequences yet devised, and are heard playing a specially written and composed medley of hits from the picture, in a lavish night-club setting that is the climax of the film. The song numbers, written by the team of Kennedy and Carr, are introduced into a specially “symphonised” selection, arranged by the composers themselves for the presentation of this massed bands finals. Buddy Rogers and June Clyde are the stars of this subject and are supported by a tremendously strong cast of players. COMMENCING SATURDAY. "DOCTOR RHYTHM.” Animal fanciers will have a heyday during the Gay Central Park Zoo scene in “Doctor Rhythm,” which will have its local premiere oh Saturday at the Empire Theatre. Not only was the famous New York ,zpp reconstructed down to the last bar‘on’the lion’s cage, but one of the most ambitious collections of trained animals in screen history was assembled for the occasion. In the colleCfibn are six lions, three leopards, six bears, two hyenas, one elephant, a tiger, a camel, a zebra, a llama, "a chimpanzee, twenty monkeys, six trained seals, a twenty-foot python and an aviary of eighty birds. The animals are not only seen, but distinctly heard, as they join in the fun with Bing Crosby, Andy Devine, Rufe Davis and Sterling Holloway. The chief feminine role in “Doctor Rythm,” a story taken from O. Henry’s tale about the physician who masqueraded as a policeman, are Beatrice Lillie, Mary Carlisle and Laura Hope Crews. Frank Tutle directed the Paramount picture.