Giant American Film, “Noah’s Ark,” Rouses Great Interest in England

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 708, 6 July 1929, Page 9

Giant American Film, “Noah’s Ark,” Rouses Great Interest in England

“VOAH’S ARK/' the new film, will amaze even habitual filmgoers, accustomed though they be to the lavishness, the variety, the breadth and sweep, and the sentiment of the screen. In all respects this picture, which cost a fortune and took 2J. years to produce, exceeds both in proportions and in faults any previous spectacle.

The Bible story o£ the Deluge is only a fragment of the whole, one interlude interjected into a modern story of war that includes dialogues, songs, trench warfare, sentiment and sentimentality and sweeps the hero and heroine into crises of violence, suffering or happiness every 10 minutes. Married to an Dolores Costello American, condemned to be shot as a spy, the heroine is entombed alive with the Russian villain. Here the scene changes to Chaldea in Biblical times. Thousands of supers and Noah and his family now appear. There are scenes of pastoral beauty, scenes in which Sacred Writ is blazoned in fire upon tablets of stone that turn themselves over for Noah to read. Cities crash, waters overwhelm everything. Nothing is left to chance. Animals that did not get into the Ark appear, as well as those that did, and the unrecorded drowning hordes of humanity, as well as the Ark and its few godly inmates, says an English writer. Hollywood has set out to stagger a world-audience before, but never on

this scale, and never with such efficiency. George O’Brien is a muscular hero. Paul McAllister, a Scotsman, makes a gentle Noah. The photography is exquisite! The ingenuity, the dari i of the picture, stun one. And this is truly a “Noah’s Ark,” a toy with which these children of Hollywood so engagingly play, compelling our attention and moving us strangely.