UNIVERSAL PLANS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 110, 30 July 1927, Page 23

UNIVERSAL PLANS

HEAVY PROGRAMME SOME COMING RELEASES TTNIVERSAL have made preparations for some interesting releases during the present season. Many of these features have already been booked for New Zealand. Twelve big special pictures will be offered on the 1927-28 programme, according to Carl J. Laemmle, president Of the twelve, five are completed, and production on the seven others will begin within a month. “The Cat and the Canary,” a production with Laura La Plante; “Les Miserables,” a Universal-Film de France production; “Love Me and the World is Mine,” with Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin; a Reginald Denny feature, tentatively called “I’ll Be There,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” more than two years in the making, are the five ready for release. The remaining seven include three Reginald Denny productions, “Now I’ll Tell One,” “Watch My Speed,” and “Ask Me Another”; “The Cohens and the Kellys in Paris”; “Show-Boat,” Edna Ferrer’s best seller, which Harry Pollard will direct; “The Man Who Laughed,” eo-starring Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin, and “The Big Gun,” a navy picture directed by Irving Willat. Victor Milner, cameraman for Paramount, is studying new effects in lighting and photography for Emil Jannings’s new picture, “Hitting for Heaven.” He will photograph dustbeams in a ray of sunlight slanting through a for one scene. Jack Mulhall is a college student with an inferiority complex in “The Poor Nut.” Jean Arthur and Jane Winton are the feminine leads, while Glenn Tryon, Cornelius Keefe, Maurice Ryan, Henry Vibart and others are in the cast. Sam E. Rork has returned to First National Studios from New York with a signed contract to make the Will Rogers picture, “A Texas Steer,” as a special feature. Will Rogers returns to Beverly Hills and Hollywood soon to start work on the preparation of continuity and script with Paul Schofield. “A Texas Steer” is the Charles H. Hoyt stage success.

experiments of an inventor bent upon creating an artificial human being, of the triumph of the Moloch Machine over man and the revolt of Man against the Machine. Now and again whispers made their Way to the public—whispers of the great doings at the creation of “Metropolis”—of the epic action and the technical triumphs which were to make this film a masterpiece of masterpieces. POTPOURRI OF ELEMENTS The final effect, now that the film has been unloosed upon the public, may justify some of these expectations —others are fated to disappointment unavoidable disappointment, since the line between the end aimed at and the end achieved is so plainly visible. The positive achievement is, however, so great that it outweighs many of the flaws and failures. These have arisen chiefly through capitulation to making concessions in something that was to be new and unprecedented, to things that were already old and tried —however trivial, however much of a discord they may have represented in the scheme of this great plan. Instead of showing us a real, stark, implacable State or city of the future, we have an astounding, even dismaying potpourri of all the elements which have ever played a part in so-called successful films. Our eyes and minds are not engulfed and overwhelmed by the implacable machine State, but are torn hither and thither by scenes and situations that are utterly familiar and that work-havoc with the unity of the whole majestic idea. We are flung into the present and catapulted into the past, and our internal 'sense of gravity is upset and our emotional and intellectual axis displaced. AWE INSPIRING SETTINGS It may be that Fritz Lang did not intend to build up a film showing a future civilisation —industrialism reduced to its last consequences. But as this great city of slaves and masters which he depicts is not of the present and cannot in this form be of the past, it must necessarily deal with the future. There is the air of Jules Verne, of Edward Bellamy, of H. G. Wells about it. —and hints of George Kaiser's “Gas,” and even of Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” A whole cosmos is unloosed upon us. The settings are awe-inspir-