“SHOW GIRL” IS COMING

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 554, 5 January 1929, Page 21

“SHOW GIRL” IS COMING

vatism, and Britain the intriguing sparkle of the American offering. Similarly, Germany’s products require the refreshing speed of the American films, and the normalizing influence of the British. Talking pictures are destined to make 1929 one of the most important years in the history of the film industry, but their appearance should not overshadow the fact that every phase of film making is advancing rapidly, spurred by competition, the greatest goad of progress.

of technique and treatment of the earlier German pictures, and yet will be classified, as those were not, as films of international appeal. The appeal, Herr Pommer things, should be international in that it deals with an event, or a conflict, or a situation common to men and women all the world over. Only thus can producers avoid making films which exhibit situations on the screen outside the common experience, alien to the trend of the general public’s thought and ideas. This theory he is putting into practice in “Home Coming,” which deals with the story of a German soldier believed dead, who returns home after years to find his wife in love with his best friend. Hackneyed as a plot, perhaps; fundamentally There are no plots which escape being so, and, of course, everything depends on the treatment.

But is Herr Pommer entirely right? asks an English critic; It was not the very ordinary love story of “Ben Hur,” but the adventures, very extraordinary from most people’s point of view, which gave it its appeal. Tn Chaplin’s comedies we notice with pleasure little everyday things we had hardly observed before, but they are presented with the curious and astonishing clarity of a dream, so that the real becomes wonderful.