ST. JAMES

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 950, 17 April 1930, Page 17

ST. JAMES

“NOAH’S ARK” ON SATURDAY The current programme at the St. James Theatre will have its final presentation there this evening. This includes the exciting detective story, “The Argyle Case,” starring Thomas Meighan, and the accompanying shorter items. ‘ “Noah’s Ark,” the picture which Warner Brothers heralded as “made to top any picture ever made,” has its premiere at the St. James Theatre next Saturday night, where it comes for an extended season. Stupendous in conception, the production was more than three years in the making, and includes in the cast over 10,000 extra characters. The story, which was written by Darryl Francis Zanuck, touches those moments of cataclysmic power between which lie 50 centuries. The characters play their parts in the soul-trying moments at the beginning of the twentieth century, and are wafted back to the days of Noah—to vast scenes of heathen debauchery—to the building of the Ark—the dark terror of the rising waters—which destroyed all but the family of the patri-

Sets covering more than a s quare mile were necessary to the production, which was directed by Michael Curtiz, internationally famed as the director of great spectacles. The cast includes Dolores Costello, who is starred with George O’Brien, Noah Beery, Louise Fazenda, Guinn Williams, Paul McAllister. Nigel de Brulier. Anders Randolf. Armand KaJiz, Myrna Loy, William V. Mong, Malcolm Waite. Noble Johnson, Otto Hoffman, and Joe Bonomo.