STRAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 303, 14 March 1928, Page 15

STRAND

“SORRELL AND SON” “Sorrell and Son,” Herbert Brenon’s matchless production of Warwick Deeping’s famous novel, is now nearing the completion of its second week of screening at the Strand Theatre. This picture is certainly one of the few genuinely great films to be released in New Zealand, and it will long be remembered as more a standard than an achievement, a standard from which many films will be judged. This fine and uplifting story of Stephen Sorrell, ex-officer and gentleman, and his son Christqpher, is more entrancing than many of the world’s most idyllic love stories; more heroic than old unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago; Deeping’s sense of the dramatic and the romantic, beautiful, but still essentially English, has been subtly improved upon by Brenon’s Irish hand, and the result, in the film “Sorrell and Son,” is screen entertainment of the highest and most •enduring order. These excellent tales of the love of a father and son seem to ring most true. They assume the aureole of real beauty when told with

taste and dignity, and when a clever author allies the dramatic and the tragic with the simple and the happily humorous, he touches high art, which is precisely what Deeping has done in “Sorrell and Son.” As for the acting of the players in “Sorrell and Son,” it is always serious, as it were, on a peak. H. B. Warner, as Captain Sorrell, is excellent, and Norman Trevor is equallytimpressive as Thomas Toland. Alice Joyce, Anna Q. Nilsson. Carmel Myers and Nils Asther complete the major roles. The Strand Symphony Orchestra, under the conductorship of Eve Bentley, renders a fine programme of incidental music, while preceding the screening of the photoplay is a very effective stage prologue.