STRAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 299, 9 March 1928, Page 14

STRAND

“SORRELL AND SON”

“Sorrell and Son,” Herbert Brenon’s production of Warwick Beeping’s famous novel, will continue a second week at the Strand Theatre commencing today. The very name of this picture is sufficient in to attract large audiences, for there has rarely been printed, in recent years, a more searching and complete study of father and son, a study that is as human and comradely as it is psychological and emotional. With a masterly hand Beeping has taken that most interesting of all creatures, a boy, and given him to the reading public in his delightful childish stages, up to manhood. And Herbert Brenon, maker of “Beau Geste” and some other very splendid films, has. kept to the letter and spirit of the author in his picture; has preserved for the screen all the charm, pathos and intrinsic beauty of the original. The picture, “Sorrell and Son,” is, in its dramatic, emotional and tragic depths as powerful and absorbing as the book, and that is really saying a great deal. For the book was a masterpiece o f prose, plot and general outlines, and for the screen to duplicate that effort in celluloid is a great feat. But audiences all over the world have learned what Brenon can do, after seeing his perfect “Beau Geste.” He excels in stories of the love that exists between men rather than the love between men and women. There is infinite poetry and solidity in his pictures of the three Gestes, and in Captain Sorrell and his Kit —more than there is in the most fanciful tales of Eloise and Abelard. The story of ex-Captain Sorrell, wearer of military honours and eventual wielder of the bar mop and the inn bucket, and the story of young Kit Sorrell, is manly, uplifting and very noble. If Beeping concentrates on the love of father and son, he is wise enough in his generation to give his modern readers a taste of London night clubs and flappers of both sexes. He marshals a cast of cosmopolitans, ranging from the Sorrells to the wealthy young parvenu whom the son falls in love with, and that dangerous and amorous shrew, the mistress of the Anchor Hotel. To the superficial observer, the ending of this fine story is unnecessarily “true to life”; it cannot be tragic, this death of Sorrell. H. B. Warner’s Stephen Sorrell is among the very finest this excellent actor has ever done; Kit Sorrell is played, in childhood, by Micky Mcßann, and in manhood by Nils Asther, the Swedish artist.

The supporting members of th© brilcast are Norman Trevor, Anna Q. Nilsson, Alice Joyce, Louis Wolheim. Carmel Myers and Lionel Belmore. The Strand Symphony Orchestra renders a delightful programme of incidental music, and specially features as its overture “The Rose.” Preceding the screening of the photoplay is a very effective atmospheric prologue.