STRAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 735, 7 August 1929, Page 17

STRAND

“SHOW BOAT” “Show Boat,” Universal’s gigantic super-talking picture, which is now at the Strand Theatre, is an adaptation of Edna Ferber’s best selling novel of the same name, and has been combined with the highlights of Ziegfeld’s musical comedy, “Show Boat.” Laura La Plante, Joseph Schildkraut and Otis Harlan head the cast of the screen version, which was directed by Harry Pollard. The story, as readers of the book will remember, concerns the life, love and adventures of a young girl. Magnolia, raised on a Mississippi Show Boat, under the tutelage of her father, Captain Andy Hawks, and his puritanical and shrewish wife, Parthy Ann Hawks. These two roles are. admirably played by Otis Harlan and Emily Fitzroy. Then, a debonair, care-free lover comes into the girl’s life. He is a gentleman gambler, down on his luck, who accepts the leading man role on the Show Boat to tide him over. This is the part in which Schildkraut shines. The young pair fall desperately in love, despite the eagle eye of Parthy Ann. How their romance flourishes, now under the guise of rehearsals, and at other times, while they are enacting sweetheart roles on the quaint stage of the Show Boat, breathing love messages in full view of the uncouth audience, is delightfully told in the picture. In the end, after her daughter has grown up and married, and after the death of her mother, she feels the yearning for the bygone days in the Mississippi and returns to the Show Boat. It is here that Ravenal comes back to her in one of the most touching scenes ever recorded for films. In a remarkable half-music, half-dialogue scene, with the haunting strains of “The Lonesome Road” swelling over the river, the two ideal lovers are reunited.