STAGE SUCCESS ON SCREEN AT ST JAMES’.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 63, 16 March 1931, Page 3

STAGE SUCCESS ON SCREEN AT ST JAMES’.

Modern life from two vastly different angles is portrayed in “The Dancers.” the excellent film which heads the new programme at St James’ Theatre. Based on the successful British stage play by Sir Gerald du Maurier and Viola Tree, “ The Dancers” is a particularly pleasing romance of how love failed to run smoothly and yet in the end worked out to a happy climax. As a story of modern youth it strikes an original note, many of the scenes being enacted in the great forest of Canada, while others give glimpses of night-club life in London, and picturesque rural surroundings in France. A young man with a»high sense of honour gives his love to a schoolgirl before he takes his departure for Canada to make his fortune. During the three years he spends in the backwoods of Canada he remains true to the compact, but the girl forgets her vows and indulges in all the dissipation that London night life has to offer. Meanwhile a dancer at the lumber camps falls in love with the young man, but he resists her advances, determining to remain true to the girl of his dreams. He then inherits a title and a large fortune and leaves for London. His former sweetheart tells him their love was only childish nonsense and that she loves another man. Brokenhearted the young man determines to go the pace like the others around him, but while in a drunken state he is found by the dancer, who had come to England, and she arranges a reconciliation with the other girl. The pair decide to get married at once, but feeling a twinge of conscience, the girl disappears and it is only after a long search that she is eventually located in a French village where a final reconciliation takes piece. The acting in the film is especially good, the principal roles being taken by Lois Moran, as the girl who defied the conventions, Phillips Holmes, as the young man, Mae Clarke, as the dancer, and Walter Byron, as a man about town who Is mainly responsible for setting the girl on the downward path. Mrs Patrick Campbell, an English actress, is seen in an excellent character role as the scheming aunt of the girl. A fine supporting programme Is screened.