STRAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 218, 3 December 1927, Page 15

STRAND

BUSTER KEATON IN “COLLEGE”

Solemnly, dead solemnly li&o an undertaker’s mute interring his favourite grandma, Ronald set out to be the champion of champions on the Clayton campus. Words cannot tell the magnitude of his failure. It simply has to be seen to be realised how slow Buster Keaton can run, how low lie can jump and what an unutterable “mug” he is at th© polevault.

“College” at the Strand this week tells the excrutiatingly funny story of a very assiduous bookworm gone wrong for the love of a lady; but she, kind soul, was content to see him trying and nobly did he vindicate himself when the villain had to be thrashed. There the world’s awkwardest athlete was triumphant and love rose supreme for itself with no campus honours. United Artists has made a great hit in “College,” one of those comedies that catch one’s sense of the ridiculous just where it has not been rubbed to the raw. Buster Keaton has a humour of his own. If one is prone to remorse it seems almost cruel to laugh at the flatness of his athletic efforts when he sets about them with the set face of an eternal trier. His career terminates comparatively gloriously when he coxes the college eight to victory with the rudder lashed to his back.

News shots at the Strand this week show the speed-merchants of the Schneider Cup doing top speed in the international seapiane race and milady’s interest will be aroused by some exquisit© modes in crepe georgette in which Paris has excelled itself.

Laughter is lord in th© Hamilton studio where “Half a Hero” was produced. Therein the man who set up two barber’s poles in Moscow and lived to regain Hollywood has a short run in th© police force and lives to tell the tale but not to the police captain. For he locks the traffic in a hopeless knot and rises to fame as the saviour and hero of an heiress.

Aesop Fable cartoons have a reputation to live up to and it can be claimed for “The Best Man Wins” that they have now a higher name to sustain. Some of the comicalities that the cartoonist has put into the pugilist wharf rat’s career are funnier than his fertile brain has conceived before.

The musical divertissement provided by Miss uwynneth Evans was very well received and the Strand Symphony Orchestra under Miss Eve Bentley gave a selection from the “Pinafore” music.