HUNTERVILLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 258, 1 November 1932, Page 3

HUNTERVILLE

ST. JAMES’ THEATRE “Fanny Foley Herself,” showing on Saturday at St. James’ Theatre, is a picture notable for several reasons. Firstly, the picture marries all-colour to a comedy-drama of real class; too often in the past an all-colour picture has been an all-nonsense picture, but “Fanny Foley Herself” is a quite thoughtful compound of grave and gay, of smiles imposed upon tears —a story of romance, sacrifice, and mother-love. Secondly, the central figure of the picture, Edna May Oliver, is a woman who has been on the stage and screen—operetta singer and what not —for at least thirty years, and her emergence now into screen stardom compares with that of the popular Alarie Dressier; indicating again how readily the “forward” present day will worship at the shrine of the “past.” Edna May Oliver appears as a vaudeville head-liner —“poor old vaudeville!”—who in her day earns about £250 a week and is therefore able to marry a millionaire’s son and to support him and their two daughters in defiance of the disinheriting millionaire. Her husband dies, and the revengeful millionaire hits her back through her daughters, by luring them away from a mother wrose ‘vulgar” stage-work the “cultured” girls—educated with her own money—have learned to despise. A great vaudeville scene in which the audience is charmed with Edna May (but her daughters arc shocked), great acts of renunciation when the mother removes herself from the girls’ social path, and a great deed of intervention when she speeds to the help of them in an hour of danger—these and other high spots give Edna Alay Oliver opportunities that she brilliantly uses.

A special matinee programme, featuring Buck Jones in “Border Law,” will be screened at 2 p.m.