TALKIES IN

Taranaki Daily News, 21 August 1930, Page 2

TALKIES IN

REALISM in a film. DISTANT RELATIVES’ BIRTHDAY. The talkie in two of its most terrible! forms has made its appearance in Ger-, many. The.one is the family, or.domestic, talking picture, in whicn faraway aunts and uncles may be cheered by a sight of birthday, wedding or christening at which they would have taken part if they had not been prevented by health, distance, or other hindrance. This is an expensive manner of ' informing relatives how the ceremony really went off, and has to be specially staged in a talking film studio-

None the less a famous German banker ordered a picture of this kind for an aged relative, who was celebrating Her sixtieth birthday on the other side of the Atlantic, and who was to receive the congratulations of the entire family group m Germany, gathered round a cable decorated in her honour. Each made his or her speech, each child, according to the approved German custom, recited the specially-learned poem, and the whole was presented before the oid aunt’s eyes on a specially-construct-ed apparatus. The war film, treated entirely from the pacifist point of view, must needs be appalling in its effect. This has been achieved by “Western Front, 1918,” a production of the Nero Company, adapted from a story dealing with four 1 comrades on the Western Front. Not only are the heart and ear-rending-.noises of the battlefield faithfully reproduced, but it has been thought well to include hospital scenes as well.