MAJESTIC THEATRE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 3, 5 January 1939, Page 9

MAJESTIC THEATRE

“THAT CERTAIN AGE” “That Certain Age,” starring Deanna Durbin, is to conclude tonight at the Majestic Theatre. Deanna, who plays the part of Alice Fullerton, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper proprietor, embarks upon a troubled romance when regarded by everyone as a child she makes an unwilling hero of a returned war correspondent, a part admirably played by Melvyn Douglas. Jackie Cooper, as the boy friend of her own age, is ruthlessly neglected in favour of the sophisticated Douglas, and the climax of the picture is provided by the efforts of Deanna’s parents and Douglas himself to talk Deanna out of her infatuation, with rather humorous results. “Blockheads” The latest humorous film, "Blockheads,” in which Laurel and Hardy are featured, screening to-morrow at the Majestic Theatre, could hardly have been more aptly named. Blockheads they are, blundering their way from one ridiculous situation to another throughout the length of the film. Even the opening sequence, which is ludicrous in the extreme, seems to be invested with an air of reality when played by Stan Laurel. Could anyone but Laurel, serving in the Great War, keep on doing sentryduty in a deserted trench for twenty years after the war has ended because no one had given him orders to stop? Twenty years after, however, the wartime comrades are united in their home city in America, and are plunged into the battlefield of everyday life, with a jealous wife and a flirtatious young lady in the adjoining apartment to add to their adventures. The picture is brief, as all humorous films should be, but a lot of fun is crowded into it, and Laurel and Hardy are well up to standard in their clowning. Patricia Ellis is cast as Mrs. Gilbert, the young and flirtatious wife of a ferocious lion-hunter who returns from a trip to Africa and India and finishes up by going after Mr. Hardy and Mr. Laurel with his elephant-gun. The supporting programme is of such excellent quality as to deserve special mention. An interesting newsreel is followed by a cartoon, and other short subjects are “Nostradamus,” a historical mystery full of interest, a Crime Does not Pay film dealing with incendiarism, a Pete Smith feature, and a coloured traveltalk, “Cairo, City of Contrasts.”