REGENT THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 September 1940, Page 2

REGENT THEATRE

“OKLAHOMA KID.” An action-packed drama of America’s greatest westward surge, “The Oklahoma Kid,” with James Cagney as tlje title character, will be shown at the Regent Theatre tonight. A stirring cavalcade of the opening of a great territory, it is one of the year’s largest productions, and numbers over 3,000 people in its huge outdoor scenes, besides the featured cast which includes Humphrey Bogart, Rosemary Lane, and many other noted players. Though he wears the sombrero, buckskin jacket and high-heeled riding boots of the frontier gun-fighter of the nineteenth century, and though he carries a brace of old Colt six-shooters on his hips instead of a modern automatic in a shoulder holster, Cagney is fundamentally the same sort of fellow as thrilled audiences in such memorarble productions as "Angels With Dirty Faces,” and “Public Enemy.” At. the outset of the story he is a bandit but not just a conscienceless killer. He is an adventurous youth who has become a sort of Robin Hood of the Southwest. Rosemary Lane plays the romantic lead opposite Cagney—and is no milk-and-sugar heroine that this flash-ing-eyed member of the acting Lane family plays—but a real girl of the pioneering days in America. Humphrey Bogart, ace bad man, furthers his screen reputation, playing the leader of a band of “Sooners” who are really a gang of treacherous gunmen. Among the many stirring scenes in “The Oklahoma Kid” is the land rush with which the picture opens. Landhungry pioneers are lined up for miles waiting for the Federal troops to give the signal that the new territory in Oklahoma is opened for settlement. Other members of the cast besides Cagney and Bogart and Miss Lane, include Donald Crisp, Harvey Stephens. Hugh Sothern, Charles Middleton, Edward Pawley, Ward Bond, Lew Harvey, John Miljan and Trevor Bardette. Supporting subjects include a bright musical revue, a melody master of Dave Appelan’s orchestra, a Porky Cartoon and the latest Cinesound News. Plans are at Steele and Bull’s and the Theatre.