MAJESTIC THEATRE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 221, 12 May 1932, Page 3

MAJESTIC THEATRE

TO-NIGHT Audiences have seen Norma Shearer as a glittering society bud; they have seen her as a brilliant sophisticate. But in "A Free Soul," in which she plays the sensational heroine of the Adela Rogers St. Johns novel, audiences see a literally new Norma Shearer. In the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture, which opens at the Majestic Theatre to-night, she is fully as alluring as in ''The Divorcee," as charmingly sophisticated as in "Let Us Be Gay"; but there is added a new element. For never in her career has she played such a dramatic role as in this romance of San Francisco, its gambling halls, and its palaces of the social elect. The conflict of the plot is twofold, relating to the love of the heroine for two vastly different men, a gambler and a society sportsman, and her equally blinding devotion to a brilliant but habitually intoxicated father. The father has raised the girl with ideas of ultra-freedom, but when he catches her in the arms of the notorious gambler he realises that he has been his daughter's worst 'enemy. In an attempt to save her from what he knows will be an unhappy alliance he' promises to give up drinking. The events which follow make up a story that never lags for a moment, and has enough suspense and action for two pictures. The work of the supporting cast is uniformly excellent. While the film is first and foremost Miss Shearer's triumph, the next honours go to Lionel Barrymore. As the father who taught his child the wrong theories of life and on realisation bares his own sins in court to save his daughter's happiness, he is a dominant and unforgettable figure.