THE NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 236, 24 December 1927, Page 13

THE NEW REGENT

AN AMERICAN EPIC "You can’t call a man a coward if he dies trying.” Auckland picturegoers will see many pictures before- they witness another so admirable in spirit, so inspiriting in theme and so faithfully reproducing historical figures as "The Rough Riders” now showing at the New Regent. Let there be no mistake over the name. This is no production from that familiar locale so frequently described in such terms as "the roaring, blue-streak, blood-sweating West.” It is a chapter out of that American epic, the Cuban War. All America has thrilled to it and the story it tells is so near the bedrock of human nature to thrill any nation in the world. It is a tale of love and sacrifice embroidered on a vividly graphic war picture; there is no spectacle for the spectacle’s sake, no play upon the cheaper emotions and no offensive outpouring of mere Yankeeism. It might well have been a tale from our own battlefields.

Two men’s love for . one girl is solved under fire. And the two men are competent actors, every inch of them. Van, the dashing big boy from the military school, Bert, the just plain Bert who never found himself until he was in retreat. Their characterisations are splendid. Bert is rather a mysterious person and his weakness is written in his face. He enlisted to the sound of the trumpets of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and didn’t really know what he had enlisted for until the shells were dropping on him. Fear gripped him and he was not worth twopence. But in retreat he came to himself and as the story says, “You can’t call a man a coward if he dies trying.” But the story is not all in the heroic vein. Noah Beery is there as Happy Joe. with George Bancroft playing opposite as Sheriff Hell’s Bells, and the comedy—pure comedy and splendidly ridiculous—is the best that has been seen in Auckland for long enough. Mary Astor as the girl is a good part and so is the representation of dashing old Theodore Roosevelt. Pathe is represented on the programme by some beautiful colour scenes in South France and splendid nature films of the life of birds. They are really intimate stories of the interesting nesting time. An amusing comic, “Kid George,” touches the heights of foolishness in a kids’ party all of grown-ups, where George after all kinds of pitiful indignities at last emerges with the girl, whiD the foreign count is being hurried off to a nice cosy corner in a county gaol. Wallace and Gennett put over a very pleasing turn of dances. Gennett is a very deft and neat executant of some

rather graceful numbers, and Wallace in his sailor’s hornpipe number brought the house down with his acrobatics. Eddie Horton coaxed the Wurlitzer into seasonable music. His first number was the Holy City, and in another he co-operated with the Pathe Band in a novelty version of “Auld Lang Syne.” With the Regent Orchestra under Mr. Maurice Guttridge the Wurlitzer combined splendidly. The intermission number -was Rubenstein’s “Reve Angelique,” in which the orchestra really excelled itself.