NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 646, 24 April 1929, Page 17

NEW REGENT

“THE BELLAMY TRIAL”

Murder will out! But the audience has to wait until the very last footage of “The Bellamy Trial,” now playing at the New Regent Theatre as a part-talkie feature, to learn who killed Mimi Bellamy. Monta Bell, who directed the mystery drama triumph, wrote the screen adaptation from the sensational magazine mystery serial from the pen of Frances Noyes Hart. His novel opening of the feature film is well merited by the powerful surprise on-ding. Certainly he has not allowed the suspense element to suffer in its transition to the screen, and the dialogue sequences only add to the realism of the courtroom scenes. Tho murder mystery is skilfully unfolded in the courtroom, when a man and a woman are on trial for their lives, accused of having slain the wife of the man accused. The weight of the evidence is against them, but a last-minute surprise witness turns the favour in their balance. The jury votes an acquittal. And the question then is: Who did kill Mimi Bellamy? Bell does not permit his story to leave his hero and heroine under the cloud of suspicion. Deftly, and with a cautious eye upon the plausibility of judicial tactics, he moves suddenly with a stroke of dramatic surprise, and reveals the guilty one. There is power and heart-throb in those final scenes that is intensified by the spoken word of the talkies. In the remarkable cast with Miss Joy and George Barraud are Betty Bronson. Kenneth Thompson, Margaret Livingston, Edward Nugent, Margaret Seddon, Charles B. Middleton, Charles Hill Mailes, and others. The short talkie features which constitute the rest of the programme are particularly interesting. The programme is opened by a syn- ] chronised orchestral overture, and the j first item is by Joseph Regan, whose j fin© tenor voice is heard in two songs. I Then there are piano solos by Vincent j Lopez, and a black-face comedian act j by Barnum and Bailey. In both these j cases the music is reproduced most astonishingly well. To add measure to an already full programme, there is a gazette, and a final talkie feature, in which Miss Ella Shields, the famous English comedienne, sings and gives impersonations in her own inimitable way.