ROXY

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 976, 20 May 1930, Page 14

ROXY

"ATLANTIC” TOMORROW The current programme at the Roxy Theatre will have its final screening there today. This includes “Cameo Kirby,” a gorgeous musical romance starring Harold Murray and Norma Terris, and “Courtin' Wildcats,” a Western comedy starring Hoot Gibson. A few days ago was the eighteenth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, a tragic calamity that shocked the world, and is still talked about whenever men seek to find, in their daily lives, the dramatic parallel of what they find in the theatre. And thus it happens that the screen presentation of Ernest Raymond’s play, “The Berg,” under the new title of “Atlantic,” is strangely apropos. At the Roxy Theatre tomorrow “Atlantic” —from the British sound production studios—will be presented. The play is based on the sinking of the Titanic, and the entire action takes place on board the ill-starred vessel. The story is told with all Ernest Raymond's complete understanding of human nature, and he sketches, with unfailing skill, the different types, their little personal stories, the petty romances and tragedies that are staged during the voyage, and then their reactions to the awful fate that is so soon to encompass them. E. A. Dupont directed “Atlantic,” and that same sense of impending disaster, that unmistakable feeling that something is hovering like a dark Nemesis over the stage, is present in “Atlantic.” The climax, when the great ship plunges into the icy ocean, with the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and the frightened woman and the pale-faced men being thrown like puppets into their watery grave, is one of the most moving climaxes the screen has effected.