NATIONAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1037, 30 July 1930, Page 15

NATIONAL

“THE SHIP FROM SHANGHAI” Charles Brabin, who achieved outstanding results with the screen transition of Thornton Wilder's somewhat difficult novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Key,” has done it again, this time with the entirely different work of Dale Collins, known in book form as "Ordeal," and now playing at the National Theatre under the more colourful title of "The Ship From Shanghai."

Although the two productions are physically in dire contrasts, “The Bridge" having had for locality the old-world atmosphere of Peru, while almost the entire action of "The Ship From Shanghai" takes place aboard a small sailing schooner on the Pacific Ocean . . . yet there is a marked similarity in the psychological content of the two stories in the respect that in each case Brabin has created of a small group of persons. Tho second picture at the National Theatre, Buster Keaton’s “Free and Easy," is made most entertaining by tho introduction in the final scenes of a comic opera sequence, in. which Buster Keaton, Trixie Friganza, Montgomery and Lottice Howell sing such numbers as “Free and Easy," "Down on the Arkansas," "Oh, King, Oh, Queen,” and "It Must Be You.”