HIS MAJESTY’S.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1380, 5 October 1916, Page 32

HIS MAJESTY’S.

‘•THE BIRTH OF A NATION.” A STUPENDOUS PRODUCTION. The most stupendous and marvellous achievement in moving picture production is presented in “The Birth of a Nation,” D. W. Griffith’s marvellous spectacle of the screen which is being shown through New Zealand by J. C. Williamson, Ltd. The Auckland season opened on Saturday when the large audience at His Majesty’s Theatre unanimously proclaimed it to be a veritable triumph of pictorial art, reaching the high-water mark of cinematographic enterprise. The making of this great photo play involved an enormous cost. Mr. Griffith, the great American picture producer, and his forces were eight months in the making. They travelled over the sections in which the story is located, and reproduced the scenes with rigid fidelity. Thousands of works of historical and official value were carefully read to get the exact particulars. A series of gigantic spectacles is the result, figuring over 18,000 men and 3,000 horses, while a ' real story of love and romance based on Thomas Dixon’s story, “The Clans-

man,” weaves its way throughout. It is a varied and enthralling spectacle of the post-slavery days of America, dramatically depicting the different phases of the struggle between the white and black races in the Southern States. The Camerons (south) and the Stonemans (north) are two families round which the lighter incidents are drawn. The Stonemnas are the children of the Hon. Arthur Stoneman, Liberal Leader of the House of Representatives in Congress whose friendship for the negro leads to tragic consequences and recoils on his own head when he finds that bis mulatto protegee aspires to his daughter’s hand. The aftermath of the Civil War is graphically shown in the ascendancy of the blacks, who, impressed with the preaching of the northern whites, that both races were on a level; practically ruled the south,

and set up a reign of terror. Drunk with power the blacks proceed from excess to excess, and nameless outrages on women and children finally lead to the formation by Cameron and others of the Ku Klux Klan, a dreaded secret society which spreads throughout the Southern States, having for its object the safety of the whites. Anarchy and disorder prevail everywhere, and there are many sensational happenings before the frenzied reign of the negro is over, and peace and justice are once mere establishedWonderfully realistic are the scenes, one of the greatest thrills being provided by the men of the Ku Klux Klan when the wliite-clad horsemen are seen dashing madly through the town in their work of vengeance. Nothing could be more powerful than the representation of the battle scenes duplicates of several Civil War conflicts, while stirring interest ’s arouse 1 in the depiction of Sherman’s march from Atlanta, the surrender of General Lee to General Grant, the assassination of Lincoln, the sitt ng of the negro parliament, and hundreds of other dramatic features that illustrated the miseries of reconstruction and the restoration of the south to its own.

Appropriateness is the insistent quality of the orchestration which is under the directorship of Mr. Horace Keats. The melodies have been culled from operatic composers and from folk and dance music. The strains of Dixie typify the Southerners, and the .Northerners have their own war songs.