THE GAMBLERS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 92, 19 April 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE GAMBLERS

H. B. WARNER PORTRAYS LEADING ROLE A REGENT THEATRE ATTRACTION Commencing this afternoon at the Regent is the Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone production, “The Gamblers,” which is undoubtedly one of the most powerfully dramatic productions ever filmed. In this picture the director of “The Gamblers” (Michael Curtiz) occasionally has a number of characters on the stage at once—as they would be seen in a legitimate play—but where two people are engaged in a tense dialogue he is rather fond of flashing from one to the other, showing each alternately. Remote as this practice is from ordinary stage dialogue, it seems to work, and the interest of the audience is maintained. Mainly, however, the success of “The Gamblers” lies in a really good plot —good in spite of the fact that the characters have to explain themselves and their motives a little too much —and excellent characterisations. H. B. Warner brilliantly plays James Darwin, the temperamental and partly misunderstood husband of a woman who has tried to make a compromise between her heart and her head In her maiden days she had loved Carvel Emerson, but knew him to be a gambler-financier; so she married Darwin, a rising criminal lawyer, Emerson continuing to be their friend and trying (unsuccessfully) to seduce her. For something resembling the Hatry trick, Darwin at one stroke arrests the gambling Jimerson and alienates his wife, who thereupon charges her husband with seeking to wreak his jealousy on a supposed rival, and at the same time with seeking to obtain promotion to the district attorneyship. To this double, charge of savage jealousy and soulless ambition, Darwin has an effective answer.

When the criminal proceedings against Emerson are called in Court, Darwin as prosecutor asks that the indictment (though true) be quashed for want of evidence (though he has evidence in plenty); thus he frees the gambler and would-be seducer, and wrecks his own chance of promotion. But he blows sky-high the indictment his wife had brought against him, and the play ends w'ith her doing the only decent thing—rejecting Emerson and returning to her husband. Not always do “talkie” films reach so good a moral, or teach it so interestingly. Warner as Darwin, Lois Wilson as the wife, and Jason Robards as Emerson give sterling performances, and are well supported by George Fawcett as Emerson Pere, and by several other good artists.