ENTERTAINMENTS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 243, 11 September 1940, Page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS

REGENT THEATRE. “THE LIGHT THAT FAILED.” , It has fallen to the lot of the one man in Hollywood who can do it to portray the role of the romantic English man of action, in one of the most adventurous of pictures by one of tho world’s greatest writers of tho period when the British Empire was in its golden age. That is to say, Ronald Oolman 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 Colman is the ideal man to play the role of Dick Ileldar, artist and soldier-of-fortune. It is, rather, because he has demonstrated- in some of the best pictures of the type that he is the man for it. One has but to run over the list of Colman successes for conviction. There are “The Dark Angel,” “Beau G-este,” “Clive of India,” “Tim Prisoner of Zenda,” “The Masquerader,” and many others in which ho was the English man of action, not forgetting, of course, others in which he was the soldier of-fortune. such as “Under Two Flags,” “Bulldog Drummond” and “If J Were King.” The reason for this series ol choice nominations, perhaps, is that Colman 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 the war in 1914. Ho 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.

METEOR THEATRE. “REWI’S LAST STAND.” “Rewi’s Last Stand,” which is now showing at the Meteor Theatre, was privately screened in Wellington to an audience which included Mr John Grierson, the Canadian Government film commissioner, who has produced many successful films. Addressing tho audience after the screening, Mr Grierson said that it was more important that New • Zealanders should have produced that film than that they should seo , a hundred films from Hollywood. Not that good films were not made in Hollywood, for they were, but because in the film they had just seen the nation had expressed itself. It was a good film, and he was surprised how near to producing a Ccvil B.- dc Millc spectacle Mr Hayward had come with the resources at his disposal. The speaker said ho realised the difficulties of creating a number of tho scenes in “Rewi’s Last Stand.” The film is based on tho Battle of Orakau, made famous by the reply of the Maori chief to tho soldiers’ offer of a truce that the Maoris would fight on for ever. A story of love between a half-caste girl and a pukehn has been woven into the authentic historic narrative to give the film a wider appeal than it would otherwise have. Tho battle is the film's climax.