REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1051, 15 August 1930, Page 15

REGENT

“JOURNEY’S END” The film version of "Journey’s End” is astounding audiences at tho Regent Theatre. Its appeal is general because it epitomises the attitude of all Englishmen toward war. Its characters appear, not as imaginary figures, but as the living prototypes of men of every class who fought, willingly or unwillingly, in the struggle for right. Each man in the play symbolises a typo and a class which every onlooker will recognise and place himself in. Stanhope, a strong man afraid of being afrai‘d, drinking to forget, and yet the love of a woman keeps him from giving way to his fear Osborne, schoolmaster and visionary, who reads "Alice in Wonderland,” while shells shriek outside his dugout and who takes the news that he is to command a raid meaning almost certain death with a stoical calm and a flow of conversational trivialities

Trotter, a Cockney risen from the ranks, who thinks more of saving his apricots than his life. When he isn't thinking about food he has tender thoughts of his "missus,” a back garden in suburbia, carpet slippers, and a pipe.

Raleigh, a public schoolboy and hero worshipper of Stanhope, who arrives to find his god whisky-sodden and bad-tempered. He cannot understand Stanhope’s resentment at his joining his company, knowing nothing of the dread that he may tell his sister (whom Stanhope loves) of his weakness. Mason, the Cockney servant, to whom the only problems which war presents to him are how to kejep the taste of onions out of the tea and make bully beef look as if it isn’t. Hibbert, the coward, a fair-haired weakling, trying to malinger, who eventually proves as brave as any when he conquers his cowardice and faces death. "Journey’s End” is certainly a picture which every citizen should see.

The combined candle power of the lighting systems of Warner Brothers’ Theatres, is adequate to furnish electric current for a town of 25,000 people.