THE HAWERA THEATRES

Taranaki Daily News, 31 March 1934, Page 20 (Supplement)

THE HAWERA THEATRES

OPERA HOUSE ATTRACTIONS To-night, Monday and Tuesday: “The Squatter’s Daughter. (Australian film). April 4, 5 and 6: “Heads We Go.” Constance Cummings and Frank Lawton. GRAND THEATRE PROGRAMMES. To-night and (Monday: “Her Bodyguard” (Edmund Lowe) and “The Mysterious Rider” (from Zane Grey story.) SOMETHING UNUSUAL HEAD DOUBLE FEATURE BILL. Paramount’s romantic comedy,. “Her Bodyguard,” heads the double feature bill at the Grand Theatre, Hawera, tonight. It stars a splendid team: Wynne Gibson and Edmund Lowe. The theme is a novel one, and is cleverly developed. Wynne Gibson is a beautiful actress, and Edmund Lowe a private detective, hired by a millionaire admirer of Miss Gibson, ostensibly to guard her jewels, but actually io protect her from advances. The actress is annoyed when she first hears of the arrangement, but soon discovers a distinct novelty in having an attractive bodyguard. Before long the actress and her escort are in love, but the usual misunderstandings develop, and there is much humour before the situation is cleared up. The supporting cast includes Edward Arnold, Alan Dinehart, and Johnny Hines, a popular comedian of the silent pictures. ZANE GREY WESTERN “THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER.”

'Zanff Grey’s exciting action-romance, “The Mysterious Rider,” made into a Paramount picture with a cast headed by Kent Taylor, Loma Andre, Irving Pichel, Gail Patrick and Warren Hymer, opens .at the Grand Theatre, Hawera, to-night. The film tells the story of ' a single man’s battle against powerful forces which seek to evict half a hundred ranchers and their families from the property which they own and love. REALLY BIRIGHT SHOW “HEADS WE GO” VIVACIOUS. “Heads We Go,” to open at the Opera House, Hawera, on Wednesday, is vivacious and fast-moving and filled with the intriguing situations which a succession of wilful and innocent deceptions lead to. The picture is a real tonic. Constance Cummings (making a highly successful debut under British producers), Claude Hulbert, Gus McNaughton and Frank Lawton are at the head of a team which wins a smile or a laugh with practically every line of the sparkling dialogue, or captures the audience’s sympathy when the course of love at first sight begins to stray as the result of a mistaken second or. third view. The plot is of a familiar type, but none, the less welcome because of its simplicity and the ever-apparent impression that things are going to right themselves in the finish. WORTHWHILE SEEING

“THE SQUATTER’S DAUGHTER.”

One of the most ambitious productions to be produced by an Australian studio is “The Squatter’s Daughter” which after receiving most favourable receptions elsewhere, with extended seasons in the metropolitan centres, comes to the Opera House, Hawera, to-night. The scenes for the most part are in a setting that will appeal to a New Zealand audience, that of a large Australian sheep station, and there are some magnificent outdoor scenes. Jocelyn Howarth is a charming “squatter’s daughter” and other well known artists in the cast are Katie Towers and Fred MacDonald. The photography is splendid. HOLLYWOOD ROMEOS SLOW WHAT SLIGHTED SHOWGIRLS SAY.

Something is drastically wrong with Hollywood romeos. They’re not treating the little chorus girls with the proper respect. A score of the screen city’s hand-picked chorus girls between elaborate dancing scenes of “Fox Follies” rose from divers resting positions the other day to call Hollywood swains to task.

It seems that a Hollywood chorus girl would attain equality with the dancing beauties of the one-time Ziegfield Follies who met by top-hatted gentlemen and driven in expensive cars to champagne dinners. The Hollywood dancer, every bit as pretty and talented as her somewhat taller and slimmer New York sister, is met at no studio doors by scions of aristocratic families—and what is worse, rides in few eight-cylinder cars. That, as the saying goes, is the fly in the ointment, for the screen chorus girl thinks she is as good and may be better than any Manhattan maid. As one “Fox Follies” beauty put it: “We don’t have the opportunities here that the girls have in New York. There’s no chance of our meeting rich admirers. Instead, our boy friends in workshop shirts and overalls pick us up in broken down flivvers. It’s tough. We just don’t get the breaks.” Lew Brown, associate producer of “Fox Follies” thinks the girls are getting a bad break as compared to stage beauties but regrets that nothing can be done about it! VACATIONS IN THEATRE TRAVELS 3000 MILES TO BRUSH UP. In a remodelled mill, over one hundred years’ old, on a country roadside fifteen miles from Philadelphia, Ann Harding often spends her vacations from the RKO Radio Studios, and she spend these vacations acting. Jasper Deeter, guiding genius of the charming Hedgrow Theatre at Rose Valley, Par., expressed no surprise at this action on the part of a world-famous movie star. He has known Ann Harding for over twelve years, ever since, in fact, she walked into the old Province-town Theatre on MacDougal Street, New York, and said she wanted to stop working in an insurance office and become an actress. “We were going into production with a fine play, ‘lnheritors,’ by Susan Glaspell,” Mr. Dreeter explains in his quiet excited voice. “It took me just 24 hours to discover that, training or no training, Ann Harding was the girl for the leading role. She had beauty, intelligence and a lovely voice. We began then to talk about acting—not as a profession, but as an art, which it is. Ann made a success in that play, and she is still playing it here in the Hedgerow, with myself and two other members of the original "st, twelve years later.”