NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 948, 15 April 1930, Page 15

NEW REGENT

“DYNAMITE” ON SATURDAY Only a few more days remain of the Regent Theatre season of "it’s a Great Life," starring the vivacious and incomparable Duncan Sisters, for years popular vaudeville headliners and musical comedy favourites. It is filled with gaiety and sparkling with pep, new songs, many of them original and sure to win popularity, gorgeous Technicolour sequences, and -beautiful backgrounds. “It's a Great Life” opens with tlie Duncan Sisters employed as sales girls in the big department store 01 “viandelbaum and Weill. Lawrence Gray, in charge ot sheet music, stages the stores' annual amateur show. I'he Duncan Sisters parody the lines of the sacred store song, "Smile, Smile Smile with Mandelbaum and Weill, and then mimic the owners. All three are fired and soon after enter vaudeville Benny Rubin, the comic Jewish soldier of “Marianne,” and Jed Prouty. the stammering booking agent ot Broadway Melody” fame, once again contribute inimitably enjoyable performances in a big cast. More and more the happenings of the day, as printed in the newspapers of the world, are becoming the sources of big motion picture plots. Where once the classics, the current plays and the current novels formed the supply for picture producers—today a story on which a fortune will be spent is grabbed off the front of a daily newspaper. A pertinent example is “Dynamite.’ Cecil B. De Mille’s first Metro-Gold wyn-Mayer talking picture, written by Jeanie MacPherson. “Dynamite” was suggested by two newspaper clippings The first was a wired Press dispatch reprinted in a Los Angeles paper, which told of the marriage of a woman to Salvatore Merra, a condemned murderer, two hours before he was hanged for murder. The hanging took place at State’s prison. New Jersey. The second clipping related the case of a woman who bought another woman’s husband by paying a large sum in advance alimony. It is on these two clippings that Cecil B. De Mille based the warp and woof of tlie plot in which Conrad Nagel. Kay Johnson. Charles Bickford and Julia Faye are the principals.