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"THE SPIRIT OF NOTRE DAME"

Laudable restrain exercised in theme as Rockne's men create genuine athletic atmosphere

Hollywood's tribute to the super-sportsman Knute Rockne, "The Spirit of Notre Dame", has met with such approval at the RKO Keith Theatre that it has been held over for a second week. The film is a worthy culmination of a wave of panegyric which has rolled over the country since the untimely death of the Czar of American football.

Considerable restraint has been exercised in the handling of this theme, one which offered unlimited opportunities for mis-treatment, for hysterical sentimentalizing over a rugged memory. One imagines that if the virile shade of "Rock" could sit in the darkened theatre and watch J. Farrell MacDonald put some of his former tutees through their paces he would not return displeased to wherever football coaches finally retire.

The picture has pace, not slowing up for the customary love interest, and the four year long football career of two young men is shown with considerable accuracy and humor. Although Lew Ayres and William Bakewell fall a little short in portraying dashing half-backs, the presence of Frank Carideo and the "Four Horsemen" contribute toward the creation of a genuine athletic atmosphere. It was inevitable that there should be occasional slips into the sentimental, but these were few, and the impression received was an almost literal one of a phase of college life which has for an emblem the brown oblate spheroid.

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