REGENT THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 December 1939, Page 2

REGENT THEATRE

“A CHRISTMAS CAROL.” Tonight marks the final screening of a truly exquisite rendition of Charles Dickens’s most loved story. Beautifully enacted its message of goodwill comes at a particularly appropriate lime and lovers of all that is great in art should not miss this last opportunity of observing it. “DODGE CITY." “Dodge City” commences tomorrow at the Regent Theatre, making its New Zealand premiere. When a year ago film critics greeted Warner Bros’ “The Adventures of Robin Hood" with as overwhelming a barrage of praise as has ever been accorded a motion picture, they added that it was not possible to make a more colourful or more spectacular adventure picture. Only "Dodge City” can provide an answer. If “Robin Hood” was pretty close to fiction, “Dodge City” is pretty close to fact, and it is all the more extraordinary and exciting thereby. More tradi-. tion attaches to Dodge City than to all the other famous frontier cities combined—for it really was a composite picture of all that was best and worst of the old West. For Dodge City in 1872 was the Western terminal of the Sante Fe railroad, and that made it the cattle centre of the country, and the mecca of the trails over which the pioneers rode. So it was to Dodge City that Warner Bros went for their picture. The entire action of the film takes place in the stop-over of railroad men in Dodge City. It begins in the summer of 1872 when the Santa Fe’s first train puffed across the prairie from Wichita and entered the cattle-town that was just a settlement on the end of civilisation. It ends when the principal characters of the film, having carried out the empire-building responsibilities they assumed when they created Dodge City, head farther West for a new railroading adventure in Nevada. Appearing with Flynn in “Dodge City” is a notable cast that includes Olivia de Haviland, Bruce Cabot. Ann Sheridan, Alan Hale, Frank McHugh and others. Michael Curtiz directed.