NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 287, 24 February 1928, Page 15

NEW REGENT

ALL,-PICTURE PROGRAMME The management of the New Regent is departing from its usual policy and is presenting an “all picture programme,” commencing to-day. The directors have purchased an exceptionally big list of star attractions for 1928. in order that a good choice may be presented to their patrons. A very careful selection has been made for to-day’s new programme, which consists of three big features and a strong supporting programme.

“ITula,” starring Clara Bow, is the chief pictorial attraction. In the picture, Miss Bow wins the nickname “Hula” because or her proficiency in the native Hawaiian dance. This is even more striking when it develops that she is not a Hawaiian. She was born in/ the Islands, the daughter of American parents, and has successfully side-stepped the “fastliving” environment which surrounds the Calhoun plantation. “Old Bill,” her father, a lovable but dissolute man, is not responsible for this. Uncle Edwin, “Hula’s” companion since the death of her mother, has really brought her up to be the sweet, dashing out-of-doors girl she is. Clive Brook, leading: man, as an English engineer, provides the complications along with a lot. of love, and this is the foundation for a fast-moving story.

The-> second feature on the programme will be “Stark Love.” This pioneer film, considered from any angle and by any criterion, is astounding in its effectiveness. Karl Brown, the producer has taken a mas of intimate facts concerning the people who inhabit the mountain fastnesses of North Carolina, and has woven them carefully into a master cinema which reveals the life of a strange people in all the stark melodrama of their savage surroundings.

The third feature is one of the Regent’s popular musical treats, another of that excellent series of “Music Masters,” showing incidents in the life of Verdi. Verdi is one of our modern composers, having died as recently as 1901 (at the age of 88), and was referred to as “the grand old man of music.” His life had been a great tragedy, the bitterness and sadness finding expression in many of his works, particularly “Aida,” the most popular of his operas. The film is a splendid production, and will be given a special presentation of organ and orchestra accompaniment. Leslie Harvey is playing “Pale Moon” and “My Blue Heaven,” while Maurice Guttridge and the Regent Operatic Orchestra will render the overture “Massienello,” by Auber. A Regent Review of world events, an Australasian local gazette, and a “Krazy Kat” cartoon will complete the programme.

A cavalry charge, intended to rival that of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, was filmed by D. W. Griffith for "Drums of Love.” his new United Artists picture. The charge, in which 835 uniformed and mounted men participated, was staged 24 miles from Hollywood, at Calabasas, a rolling pastoral country. "Drums of Love” is the story of two feudal brothers pledged to one another by the deathbed wishes of their father, and who fight and play together and finaly part, when the younger violates the oath and falls in love with the elder brother’s captive wife. Griffith has promised in this picture another as colourful and spectacular as his “Intolerance,” and “The Birth of a Nation,” and a photo-play as romantic and human in its appeal as “Broken Blossoms.” In the cast are Mary Philbin, Lionel Barrymore, Don Alvarado, Tully Marshall and William Austin.