“HINEMOA”

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 255, 18 January 1928, Page 6

“HINEMOA”

GAUMONT HAS MADE OF “HINEMOA” A NEW ZEALAND FILM FOR NEW ZEALANDERS

ADVANCE SCREENING “Hinemoa” is a New Zealand film for New Zealanders. It will be interesting to see, however, how New Zealanders will receive “Hinemoa.” The advance screening of the Gaumont New Zealand-made picture took place yesterday at the Tivoli Theatre. TT is not that the Maori maid has A changed. She is just the same sweet, simple heroine, the pride of the Arawa people, that every New Zealander has known in history since childhood. There is just the possibility though that we have changed. A constant offering of vampires, gum-chewing, broncho-riders, warwhooping Red Indians, death-defying slides for silfe, and the thousand and one ingredients that the American producer invariably stirs in his hotchpotch of sensationalism, cannot alto-

gether be disregarded. It must have some effect upon the national appetite for moving pictures. Yet to those who can appreciate a simple story—the love of a maid and a man—admirably told, mirrus any falfee seraining after-effect; to those who like to see the sub-titles of a picture written in correct English, and the sequences harmoniously unfolded, then “Hinemoa” will give them a sense of artistic satisfaction never previously experienced from an entirely New Zealand photographed movie.

Not that “Hinemoa” is devoid of excitement.

The scenes where Tutanekai, in

order to prove that he was innocent of the crime imputed—the breaking of the tapu law in the Rotorua village—walks through the inferno, is something that not even Hollywood could emulate, unless at enormous expense. Some of these scenes were photographed on White Islands, others were taken at the Satanic playground at Rotorua. The acting—the cast incidentally has no Europeans in it —is of high order; the photography is excellent; and the old love legend is presented with a care for detail which New Zealand pictures in the past have not known. Gustav Pauli has made Hinemoa and Tutanekai as the gods intended them—two very much in love and essentially human young people. Gaumont has every reason to be satisfied with its first New Zealand production. The final scene, in which Mr. and Mrs. Tutanekai and Tutanekai, jun., seated on a rock, gaze across the waters of Rotorua, the watery path •which Hinemoa swam to Mokoia, closes the picture on a particularly happy note. The value of “Hinemoa” from a tourist propaganda point of view must undoubtedly be very considerable.