RIALTO AND REGENT, EPSOM

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 407, 16 July 1928, Page 14

RIALTO AND REGENT, EPSOM

“THE KING OF KINGS” The picture, “The King of Kings,” the story of the life of Christ, will be shown to-night at the Rialto and Regent (Epsom) Theatres. Praising “The King of Kings” seems as impertinent as patting a grett monarch on the back, but if the greatness of the film, greatly handled, almost disarms criticism, let at least some honour be paid where honour is due. Once it was music that winged religions to the multitude. Will the films in view have that mission? Until recently, great plays have fought shy of spiritual issues, but films are making up that dramatic leeway. Some years ago Jerome K. Jerome’s “Passing of the Third Floor Back” put the idea of incarnation obliquely on the screen. A more dramatic bit of sacred filming was “The Ten Commandments,” and now “The King of Kings” comes out with a candid pictorial drama of the brief but tenselypacked public life of Jesus, based on Biblical captions. There is no modernistic attempt to gloss over miracles. It is through the miraculously opened eyes of a blind child that He first appears in this picture, and the raising of Lazarus from the dead is literally terrific, to use a much-misused word, in its dramatic impact on the beholder’s mind, and the force of the Lazarus incident lies not in any wild gestures of whirling sub-titles, but in the quiet deliberation with which the resuscitated body assumes a living and expectant posture.

Professor Leon Theremin, youthful Russian inventor of the apparatus which draws “Music from the Ether,' was the guest of David Wark Griffith and Morris Gest at a performance of “Drums of Love” at the Liberty Theatre. After the performance, the Russian Edison turned to the producer of “The Birth of a Nation” and said: “They call what I have done miraculous. That is nothing. What you have done is more than that. It is beautiful. Never befipre have I been able to imagine such beauty on the motion picture screen.”