ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 242, 10 September 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

STATE THEATRE. “SWANEE RIVER.” Tito beloved and famous melodies that are America’s only real folk music, and (lie thrilling story of the man who wrote them, show at tho State Theatre today in a magnificent technico’.our motion picture, Twentieth Century-Fox’s “Swaneo River,” the story of Stephen C. Foster, tho great American troubadour. One leaves the theatre with ears ringing with tho melodies that seem to express the very heart of America —“The Old Folks at Homo” (“Swanee-River”), “Old Black Joe,” “My Old Kentucky Homo,” “Do Camptown Races,” “Jcanic With tho Light Brown Hair,” “Ring, Ring do Banjo,” and “Oh; Susanna!” Don Ameelie plays Foster just as ho was —sweet and tender,■ headstrong, 1 inspired, and emotionally unstable. As Jane, Andrea Leeds is a proper inspiration for some of America’s greatest music. A 1 Jolson puts over tho role of Christy, the black-face minstrel man, with a humour and vigour unparalleled in his long career. Filmed in technicolour, “Swaneo River” recalls those colourful, romantic day 6of minstrels and river boats; tho nostalgic touches are an added attraction to this picture that has everything else. Featured in tho supporting east are Felix Bressart, Chick Chandler, Russell Hicks, George Reed, and the Hall Johnson Choir, whose singing of the Foster songs is memorable, indeed. Sidney directed with a sureness of touch and feeling for tho story that makes it a genuine delight. REGENT THEATRE. “THE LIGHT THAT FAILED.”

It has fallen to the lot of the one man in Hollywood who can do it to portray tho role of the romantic English man of action in one of the most adventurous of pictures by one of the world s greatest writers of the period when the British Empire was in its golden age. That is to say, Ronald Column stars in Rudyard Kipling’s great action romance. “The Light that Failed,” showing to-day at the Regent Theatre. It’s not because he’s English himself —Hollywood has many English actors—that Column is the ideal man to play the role of Dick Ueldar, artist and soldier-of-fortune. It is,, rather, because he has demonstrated in some of the best pictures of tlie type that he is the man for it. One has but to run over the list of Column successes for. conviction. There are “The Dark Angel,'’ “Beau Gesto,” “Clive of India.” “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “The Masquerader,” and many others in which lm was the English man of action, not forgetting, of course, others in which he was the sol-dier-of-fortune. such as “Under Two Flags,” “Bulldog Drummond” and “If I Were King.” The reason for this series ot choice nominations, perhaps, is that Column in real life is the English man of action. Born in Richmond, County of Surrey, England, the fifth of six children, he prepared himself for a commercial carem until the outbreak of tlie war in 1914. He immediately joined up with the famous London Scottish, the regiment which won from the enemy the title “Ladies from Hell,” before the war was very many months old.