NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 670, 23 May 1929, Page 17

NEW REGENT

“THE SHOPWORN ANGEL” Nancy Carroll and Gary Cooper are heard in the talkies for the first time in their co-featuring vehicle for Paramount, “The Shop-worn Angel,” now at the New Regent Theatre. There are both singing and talking sequences. Taken from an original story by Dana Burnet, the screen play relates the tale of a lonesome young man in New York, who falls in love with a playgirl of Broadway. The screen play was written by Howard Estabrook. The Supporting programme includes songs by Ruth Etting. well known singer on the Columbia records; a sound-synchronised gazette; a talking comedy, “Jack Duffy and Sunny Boy”; and. finally, Eastern songs by two Chinese girls. Years of experiment and studv in screen make-up were thrown aside by Lon Chaney when, in “West of Zanzibar,” the picture at the Regent next Monday, ho abandoned all former forms of disguise, to appear in entirely new' forms of facial deception. When this story of the Belgian Congo was in production at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer*stuclios, Chaney had to work for the first time under the new incandescent lights, and, because of the difference between these and the older studio arcs, had to change the wTiole procedure of make-up. All his former experiments and study were based on light from the older type of illumination. Written and directed by Tod Browning, the cast of “West of Zanzibar” includes Lionel Barrymore, Mary Nolan, Warner Baxter, Jane Daly, Kalla Pasha, Roscoe Ward, and others of note. As “Dead Legs Flint” Chaney first appears in “West of Zanzibar” as a stag© magician, performing theatre illusions, and then, paralysed In a fight with an enemy, is next seen in the African jungles ruling a tribe of savages by his strange “magic” as a white “voodoo” priest. All the time he trails the man who injured him, and formulates a terrible plot of revenge. Among the sensational highlights are the replicas of weird voodoo rites, and the ceremonies of devil worshippers in the Congo jungles, with hundreds of people taking part in these unique rites.

Esther Ralston will play the feminino lead in Richard Dix’s latest starring picture for Paramount, titled “The Wheel of Life.”