All of Me

"All of Me" is not a highlight in the career of any of the principal players. It is slow to get to any point, and after the climax it slithers off weakly into nothing.

That said, none of the actors is bad here, and all have flashes of something quite special. James Flood's direction is so stilted it drags the sometimes interesting dialogue down with it. And none of the performances can quite rise above that. The plot is absurd while it tries to be important. The script plays coy with the obvious element of out-of-wedlock pregnancies not to mention premarital sex. The end scene, if you can call it that, is the limpest point of the film.

Fredric March is reteamed with Miriam Hopkins for the first time since they were so great in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The combination is not nearly as interesting here. They are lovers (he a professor and she a student, for added raciness) who have intellectual differences about love and marriage. Only when they cross paths with George Raft and Helen Mack do they begin to discover that love is more about heart and soul than about a thought process. Raft and Mack are lovers trying to overcome a criminal lifestyle that has left them at the mercy of the System.

March underplays his role with aplomb and disappears for a long stretch while Hopkins (for good reason) seems to struggle to find motivation in her confused character. Their situation gets tiring and is set aside all together as the Raft-Mack subplot takes over. This is fortunate as it is much more interesting. Unexpectedly, after slogging through the storyline, Raft is quite compelling in the climax. Mack is direct and on-point throughout.

March and Raft were both stars for Paramount, and the studio would have had trouble finding two more different men with such different styles. That could have been interesting, but alas, they have only one scene together.

In the era from about 1930 to mid 1934, Hollywood films were amazingly risque and most folks today wouldn't realize this. Topics like adultery, abortion, homosexuality and fornication were relatively common...and the commonness of this adult content led to a backlash. Soon groups were calling for the government to make Hollywood clean up its act...and to prevent outside interference, the studios agreed to a long list of demands to make movies more nice. Suddenly, all the taboo topics which were in films were now buried and films became squeaky clean...and in some ways, a bit dull.

One of the more notorious Pre-code films was "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". And, apparently pairing Frederic March with Miriam Hopkins was assumed to be a key to the movie's success...as well as an ample dose of sex! So it isn't surprising that they'd bring the pair back for a few more films...including this late Pre-code film, "All of Me". While "All of Me" isn't nearly as salacious as "Dr. Jekyll", it did cover premarital sex and pregnancy!

When the film begins, Professor Ellis (March) is feeling dissatisfied at the university. But he's very happy with his girlfriend, Lydia (Hopkins) and wants her to marry him and go away with him to the West Coast for a new job. But she has other plans...she wants to live together without getting married in Paris. She also soon learns that she's pregnant...and this is about the same time Ellis leaves for his job on the coast. Now, due to her unwillingness to marry him and refusal to follow him to the West, Lydia is facing single motherhood and the ensuing ridicule.

Just before the Professor leaves, he and Lydia were out celebrating when they met a hood (George Raft) and his girlfriend. The four of them spend the evening together...and the hood ends up stealing Lydia's purse! Now this part makes little sense...a short time later, the hood's girlfriend contacts Lydia and asks for her help. They both are locked up and the lady is also pregnant...and Lydia carries messages between them. Why would she do this? And, why would she later help them both to escape?! I dunno...nor do I think the writer knew either! What happens next in this very strange and confusing film?

This film has lots of Pre-code content BUT that alone doesn't make it a good or bad film. Sadly, the writing isn't very good and the story simply makes little sense much of the time....as if story elements were being randomly tossed into the script! It clearly could have used a massive re-write, as there are a lot of plot elements but they never really seem to come together into a coherent story. I just cannot believe that the studio would green light such a film...especially with some of its top stars involved. But, somehow, this mess of a film was made....and not surprisingly it lost a lot of money...and deservedly so.

Frederick March loves Miriam Hopkins and she loves him. He wants to get married. She thinks marriage kills love. He wants to go work on Boulder Dam, but she wants her life in the East, so she tells him she's pregnant. He believes her, and is ready to change everything, until she confesses she is not... and he walks out in disgust that she would lie about this.

The story shifts to show another couple, George Raft and Helen Mack; they want to get married, but he has a record, and they don't want the baby to have to deal with a jailbird father. Then each of them wind up in jail....

Released in the last few months before the Code became enforced, this is as pre-code as a story can get, albeit one without naked women. Written by William Buchman and Thomas Mitchell, it's a meditation on the destruction that overwhelming love can yield. Although director James Flood handles this briskly and efficiently, he doesn't bring much to it; Raft and Miss Mack, however, are terrific in their desperation.

If you mention Thomas Mitchell to me, I think of his great performances in the late 1930s and 1940s. He was a wonderful character actor, who could bring a realistic comic touch to any role. I was surprised to realize he has six writing credits for movies, although five of them are for versions of his Nroadway play LITTLE ACCIDENTS.

All Of Me is a story of two couples, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins and the second couple is George Raft and Helen Mack. I never thought I could say this in a review, but in a bad film George Raft and Helen Mack as the second couple actually gave better performances than the other two. March especially looked disinterested in the whole procedure.

Who could blame him really. The story is based on a play called Chrysalis that flopped on Broadway closing after 23 performances. In those days after the motion picture got a voice even flop plays could command a price as the studios cranked out more films than now. Occasionally some of those flops became great films. Not here though.

Chance placed March and Hopkins with Raft and Mack at a club where Mack stole Hopkins's purse. March is a college professor bored with his life who has taken student Hopkins on as a mistress. He wants to go west and build Boulder, later Hoover dam.

Next to his concerns they sound trivial as Raft and Mack from the lower classes just struggle to survive. She's pregnant in a home for wayward girls and he's on parole. Parole can be tougher than jail at times for some people and these two are barely surviving.

On the flimsiest of pretexts Hopkins who's a bored socialite take an interest in their problems. Of course helping Raft break jail after he's sent back for the purse theft is way too much. In fact quite unbelievable. Hopkins probably was as bored as March, but she carried through.

But in a bad film Raft and Mack have a certain appeal as the doomed lovers. Watching what happens to them I was thinking Uncas and the white Monroe girl captive who fall in love in The Last of The Mohicans. Possibly author Rose Porter of the original play used them as an inspiration.

Also interesting is Blanche Frederici as the blue nosed reformer of the home for wayward girls who has a mandatory reading of Little Women in order to inspire her charges to mend their evil ways. She was good and hard to believe people thought that way back then, but believe me they did.

On Broadway the parts that March and Raft play were done by Humphrey Bogart and Elisha Cook,Jr. Sam Spade and Wilmer. Back then Bogey still primarily on Broadway did not play gangster parts, that came with The Petrified Forest.

This film didn't do March or Hopkins any good. But both were doing other and better work and getting a lot of acclaim. All Of Me might have been a good piece of work for Raft and Mack as a melodrama about star crossed lovers had they concentrated exclusively on them.

Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins pair up together again after their dynamic chemistry in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the romance All of Me. Once again, the sparks fly between them, especially in their steamy scenes. Freddie plays a respectable college professor, and Miriam is his tempting, free spirit student. He wants to marry, but she refuses. She's convinced that once a couple marries, all the love drains out and they wind up hating each other.

While dining in a nightclub, they overhear the urgent conversation at a neighboring table. George Raft and his girlfriend, Helen Mack, are in trouble. They're poor, he's an ex-con, and Helen's pregnant. It's a chance encounter, but one that changes everything between the two couples. The first half of the movie seems like a harmless little romance, but after George and Helen show up, it turns into a very heavy drama. It's extremely dark, and it slipped just under the mandatory Production Code enforced later that year. Have a comedy lined up for after this movie, because it's tough to watch. But if you're a George Raft fan, you might want to check it out.