“THE GUARDSMAN.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20275, 9 April 1934, Page 3

“THE GUARDSMAN.”

Gay and Saucy Farce at Plaza. Metro - Goldwyn - Mayer's diverting 1 farce, “ The Guardsman,’’ heads the excellent programme at the Plaza Theatre this week. It brings to tne talking screen for the first time Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, two of the most famous of New York's stage players. They are aided and abetted in the nonsensical stuff of which this brilliant him is made by Zasu Pitts and the ever-popular Roland Young. On Saturday night, when there was a capacity audience, Mr and Mrs G. B. Shaw occupied front seats in the circle, and appeared to enjoy this most amusing film. “ The Guardsman ” depicts the efforts of a lovecrazy husband to put his wife’s fidelity to the test by making violent love to her in disguise. This makes for gay and saucy entertainment. Alfred Lunt plays the temperamental actor-hus-band, and the glamorous Lynn Fontanne is the wife. The pair play Shakespeare, are everywhere the idols of the public, hold hands and kiss at the final curtain, and seem to be the ideal married couple. Back in the dressing-room the husband gets on his wife’s nerves by outbursts of unreasonable jealousy, and the actress eases her feeling by playing Chopin in the dark and weeping a little. This makes the silly husband suspicious that she desires a more romantic lover, and he . puts her feelings to the test by disguising himself as a colonel of Cossacks and wooing her by more or less direct methods. An observer of all this is an old friend of the couple, a theatrical critic, who is thoroughly amused, since he knows that the pair are genuinely in love. In this part, Roland Young is a great success, sauntering through the film, monoeled and debonair, meditatively sucking his cane-top, and managing to turn up for all the piquant situations. Zasu Pitts has only a minor part, as the maid who opens the front door to the husband in his swaggering Russian disguise, but she gets her share of the innumerable laughs. The farcical story soars to its zenith when the big ** Russian,” having been locked out of his own house by his own wife, who ■ protests her loyalty to her “ absent ” husband, suddenly finds the front door key thrown at his feet from an upper window. What happens thereafter c\\ depends on whether or not you bciieve the wife’s assertion that she saw through the disguise from the outset. But this problem need worry -nobcdy, since “ The Guardsman.” in its suave Continental sophistication and ultramodern settings, is all that anyone could ask of a first-rate comedy. The sunports are capital, not least of them being a Walt Disney Silly Svmphonv in full colour, with Old King Cole entertaining in a frenzv of fun all the fairv folk of the story books that ever delighted children. The programme, will be screened at all sessions throughout the week.