The New Pictures

All of Me (Paramount) has a title borrowed from a popular song, a story borrowed from William Faulkner and subjected to reverse English. In The Story of Temple Drake, Miriam Hopkins was a well-bred girl whose association with low characters led to unpleasant doings in a cornbin. In All of Me she is a patrician girl, selfishly in love with a young engineer (Fredric March). Her association with a petty crook (George Raft) and his mistress causes her to be a bigger and better person. Raft steals a handbag, goes to jail, kills a guard escaping from Manhattan's Welfare Island, swims across the East River, rescues his mistress from a reformatory and commits suicide by jumping out of a hotelroom window. These activities suggest to the heroine of All of Me that the least she can do for her engineer is to follow him to Colorado where all the running water is in dams.

Miriam Hopkins is one of the few cinemactresses who can face a camera and, without speaking or scratching her nose, convey the impression that her head is full of thoughts. Consequently, scenes in All of Me which show her as an attentive audience to the curt love making of Raft and his mistress are more effective than they should be. The picture is a pee-wee parable, strident, quick and insincere. Grisly shot: Raft's jump.

Hell on Earth (Aeolian Pictures) is a polylingual peace tract, adapted from a story by Leonhard Frank (Karl and Anna) and filmed in pre-Nazi Germany. Its gospel is Internationalism according to Marx.

Before the War a Jewish tailor is shown at his wedding, his friends crying Mazeltov ("Good luck"). A Frenchman picks up a pretty girl, takes her to a shooting gallery. A Briton awaits the birth of his son. A Negro tap-dances in a Paris music hall. A German cabinetmaker watches his son play with a toy cannon. This cannon fades into a real one and War begins. After a battle the Jew, the Frenchman, the Briton, the Negro and the German find refuge, one by one, in an abandoned dugout between the lines. They make friends, lose their race-consciousness. After the dugout is barraged from both sides the five clamber deliberately out, go forward together.

Hell on Earth solves linguistic difficulties and makes its point by emphasizing the internationalized Negro, who speaks three languages, and the Jew who, having lost his voice in battle, must pantomime his thoughts. Played by Wladimir Sokoloff of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Jew provides good facial expressions when he helps the German (Ernst Busch) with his mending; good sounds when he bellows wordlessly to warn his comrades of a gas attack. Photographed with an eye to symbolism, Hell on Earth is outspoken propaganda when it ends with the question: "Where are the five men going?'' A caption answers: "To fight all IM- PERIALISTIC WARS."

You Can't Buy Everything (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Set unconvincingly at the turn of the century, this picture presents Hannah Bell (May Robson), a stubborn, avaricious, domineering old widow who is "the richest woman in the world." What Hannah Bell cannot buy are love and happiness. She saves money by living in cheap lodgings, making her son's clothes, putting him in a charity hospital. She bullies her bankers. When she grudgingly gives money for a free clinic it is only for spite, to take business away from private practitioners. Throughout the years it is her aim to ruin a banker (Lewis Stone) who jilted her in her youth. During the Panic of 1907 she succeeds, unmoved by the fact that her son has married his daughter. When Hannah Bell at last finds out why the banker's pride forced him to leave her, she wanders stonily to a park bench, contracts pneumonia, recovers in time for tearful reconciliations all around. Good shot: Hannah Bell hunched on a stool clipping coupons.

Hi, Nellie (Warner). Last year newspaper pictures were about Broadway columnists. This winter they are about city room celebrities demoted to writing advice to the lovelorn. Part comedy, part melodrama, Hi, Nellie shows how Bradshaw (Paul Muni) retrieves his city editorship by digging up the inside story on a vanished judge whose corpse he finds in a graveyard where it was placed by gangsters.

Adapted by Aben Finkel and Sidney Sutherland, two able ex-journalist scenarists, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and acted, with characteristic authority, by Paul Muni, it would be rational to expect Hi, Nellie to be plausible. Instead it is another anthology of expletive improbabilities. The city room of the Times-Star is conducted as though it were a day nursery. The girl (Glenda Farrell) who precedes Bradshaw as "Nellie Nelson" is overfond of inelegant cliches like "So you can't take it." When Bradshaw sits down to write a column, he does it with one sheet of paper in his typewriter. Hi, Nellie is one cut above Darryl Zanuck's feeble Advice to the Lovelorn which it copies, but its only veracity is a performance by Ned Sparks as an embittered legman. Good shot: tiny Sidney Skolsky, Holly-wood columnist for the New York Daily News, making his cinema debut when emerges timidly a nightclub wash room.

Paul Muni is the reverse of comedians who want to play Hamlet. He says: "It has been my misfortune to be typed in heavy roles and to play in sombre things. . . . I want to reveal to myself that as an actor I am not . . . incapable of any thing else." Born Muni Weisenfreund in 1895 at Lemberg, Poland, he grew up in stock companies, traveling with his father and mother. He made his stage debut at 11, in the role of a man of 60. By the time he made his Broadway debut most people thought he was really an old man. Scarface in the cinema and Counsellor at Law on the stage are his two best known parts. In the cinema, he has specialized in tours de force like Seven Faces, in which he performed with different make ups as Napoleon, Joe Cans, Franz Schubert, Don Juan, Diablero, Papa Chibou. In The World Changes, he aged by slow stages from boyhood to senility. Muni rehearses by reading his role into a dictaphone, then studying his own inflections. He collects dictionaries, insists on having his foods broiled and his liquors neat. One of his diversions is to ask police men questions in Yiddish. Another is to make himself a nuisance in crowded places by pretending to be a bedazzled yokel. He says: "After 27 years on the stage know as little and I'm as bewildered as the next fellow."

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