REGENT THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 November 1939, Page 2

REGENT THEATRE

“SEQUOIA.” Screening finally tonight is the fine double programme, “Flirting with Fate” and “Sequoia.” The first-named is an hilarious comedy, featuring Joe E. Brown, while “Sequoia” is unquestionably one of the most beautiful animal and nature studies ever filmed. “VALLEY OF THE GIANTS.” An intensely dramatic film story, enacted by a great cast, and based on a well-known novel, can hardly fail to be exciting motion picture fare. Add t 8 this the exquisite pictorial beauty of California’s redwood country, filmed in vivid technicolour —and patrons have “Valley of the Giants,” based on the famour Peter B. Kyne novel, which will be shown tomorrow at the Regent Theatre. The Kyne saga of the redwood forests has been picturised twice before. In the days before the screen learned to talk Milton Sills and Wally Reid were the stars, and they have a worthy successor in young Wayne Morris, who is probably closer to the author’s conception of the hero than either of the former stars. He is to the very life, the big, lusty—young lumberman who fights so valiantly to prevent the despoliation of his beloved redwood forests. The performers in the Warner film inclde Claire Trevor, Charles Bickford, Alan Hale, Frank McHugh, Donald Crisp, Jack Laßue, John Litel and Dick Purcell. But none of them rests on previous laurels; they all prove anew their right to their well-earned reputations. It is a perfect subject for a colour picture, and persons who have never visited the redwood forests are likely to find as much interest in the views of the big trees and the shots of their being felled by lumbermen as they are bound to find in the unfoldment of the tense.ly dramatic plot. Without its “big” scenes, “Valley of the Giants” would still be fine dramatic entertainment; with these scenes, the effect on the audience was actually spine-tingling. Colour and. sound when added to photography aS bi’llifantly as they are in this production becomes enormously effectice dramatic devices. Some of the impressive and exciting scenes are: The felling of a huge, 325-foot-high redwood; the burning down of the land office in the fictitious town of San Hedrin; the rescue of the heroine from a runaway freight car; the crumbling, like a mass of toothpicks, of a high railroad trestle as four redwood-laden flat cars are rolling over it; a bitter hand-to-hand battle between hero and villain on the narrow top of a damn spanning a turbulent stream; and the dynamiting of that dam.