STATE THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 December 1939, Page 2

STATE THEATRE

"ASK A POLICEMAN.”

The well-known British comedian, Will Hay, ably assisted by Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt, has blundered through many Public Services. In the G.B.D. attraction, “Ask a Policeman,” which will be presented at the State Theatre tonight, the three do their best to ruin the local rural constabulary, and here they make an hilarious digression into what they imagine to be the realm of the supernatural. As members of the police force in a village that has had no crime for ten years five, weeks and four days, they are faced with the necessity to justify their by no means miserable existence, and to do this they endeavour, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the village is a hot-bed of smuggling, to create an artificial “crime wave.” They soon find that there is a real one in full swing. An old country rhyme, the last line of which they have some understandable difficulty in remembering, forms the basis of the ghostly doings in which a headless horseman is supposed to drive a hearse lit by ghastly lights across the countryside. Although Will Hay and Graham Moffatt are definitely sceptical, Moore Marriott believes it to such a point that he even tells the Chief Constable that when he saw it he lost his hair, and all his teeth fell out in a night! In a wildly hilarious sequence, the three blundering policemen try frantically to escape in their car from the galloping horses and the ghastly driver. The sight of this apparent visitation from another world injects drama into the comedy, and has a logical bearing on the story as it is discovered later that the horse and the horseman are both used to intimidate the local peasantry from inquiring too closely into the nocturnal travels of the gang of smugglers, headed by no less a person than the Squire himself. But the effect on the comic trio is such that they hardly know what they are doing. The associate picture is “The Frog,” a super-thriller based on one of Edgar Wallace’s best sellers. The leading role is taken by Gordon Harker and he is supported by a strong cast including Rene Ray, Una O’Connor and Hartley Power;