The New Pictures

Make Me a Star (Paramount). In the current deluge of pictures about Hollywood, someone had the good sense to dig up Harry Leon Wilson's old story, Merton of the Movies. As a play by Marc Connelly & George Kaufman it was the classic of its genre. Now as a talking cinema, under a new title to deceive cinemaddicts who saw it as a silent picture and might not want to see it again, it is still superb entertainment.

Merton Gill (Stuart Erwin) is a grocery clerk who longs to be a cinema celebrity. Equipped with stupidity to equal his ambition, he goes to Hollywood, informs a casting director that he has a diploma from a correspondence school of acting. His bemused enthusiasm makes his predicament sad as well as funny. Once admitted to a studio lot, he remains for two days, sleeping in property beds, eating property pork & beans. A generous extra girl (Joan Blondell) tries to befriend him but in so doing adds the last straw to Merton's misery. She gets him a job with a director who makes a burlesque "western" with Merton as the hero. He plays his role in earnest. At the preview of the picture he is so broken by the knowledge that he has performed as a buffoon that he sets off home. The extra girl tries hard to comfort him and seems to be succeeding.

Better than any other actor in Hollywood, Stuart Erwin has mastered the expression of befuddlement. He was a bewildered drunk in innumerable pictures before his ability got him, in Make Me a Star, his first starring part. There are times when Erwin reads the pathos between his lines a little too vociferously but there are other times when his confident naivete suggests a Chaplin who can talk. He makes Merton's grand gesture of presenting the extra girl with a wrist watch hilarious by the way he says: "It's a little token of my esteem and . . . it's guaranteed." Director William Beaudine had fine dialog to work with and he put in a few sharp touches of his own. The gross face of an anonymous cinemaddict who is almost strangled by his amusement at the preview of Merton's picture, underscores the gesture of shame with which Merton rolls up his cowboy hat, hides it under his coat.

In Aren't We All? (Paramount British), Director Harry Lachman helps to shatter the glittering surfaces of Author Frederick Lonsdale's play by hammering them with irrelevant elaborations. His cast--with the exception of Gertrude Lawrence--does likewise. Hugh Wakefield delivers parlor witticisms with a smile more vehement than that of the late Theodore Roosevelt. He is Lord Grenham, an ill-behaved but jolly curmudgeon whose experience in getting himself out of romantic scrapes stands him in good stead when he is trying to right things between his son and daughter-in-law. In addition to poor casting--a defect common to British cinemas because the best British actors are either on the stage or in Hollywood--this one, second product of Paramount's Elstree studio to be released in the U. S., suffers from poor photography and sound recording. Typical shot: Margot (Gertrude Lawrence) and Willie (Owen Nares) squabbling in an ornate night-club while a Negro orchestra in shirt-sleeves plays The Peanut Vendor amid a cloud of toy balloons.

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