Love Me Tonight ***** (1932, Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Charles Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, Myrna Loy, C Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig) – Classic Movie Review 1358

Producer-director Rouben Mamoulian’s rousing 1932 pre-Code vintage Hollywood musical comedy Love Me Tonight is one of the genre’s highspots. With much of the story told in sung dialogue, it has a reputation as the ultimate film musical. It was later bizarrely cut by eight minutes on re-release for censorship reasons after the Hays Code was initiated, and its missing minutes have never been restored and are presumed lost, yet it is one of the top 100 movies of all time.

Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are perfectly matched as the movie’s stars and perfectly on song too as they sing the evergreen classics ‘Love Me Tonight’ (sung by Chevalier),‘ Lover’ (sung by MacDonald), ‘Mimi’ (sung by Chevalier and MacDonald) and ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ (sung by Chevalier and MacDonald). This tuneful Richard Rodgers (music) and Lorenz Hart (lyrics) musical is nothing if not effervescent.

It also features That’s the Song of Paree, A Woman Needs Something Like That, The Poor Apache, The Son of a Gun Is Nothing But a Tailor by Rodgers and Hart and Deer Hunt (music by Rodgers).

Chevalier stars as a Parisian tailor called Maurice who is in love with an initially frosty princess named Jeanette, played by MacDonald. Chevalier follows the princess to her château to be paid for clothes, but he poses as a nobleman and is introduced to her as a baron.

The inimitable stars are at their brightest, and Mamoulian’s innovative direction still casts a potent spell. Rogers and Hart wrote nine lovely new songs specially for the film. The staging of ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ was ground-breaking, combining singing and film editing, as the song is passed from one singer or group of singers to another, who are in different places. It is sung by Chevalier, Bert Roach, Rolfe Sedan, the chorus and MacDonald.

The film’s technical innovations include the use of pans, zooms, split-screen and slow-motion. Indeed, it was the first film to use a zoom lens.

The screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young and George Marion Jnr is based on Léopold Marchand and Paul Armont’s play Le Tailleur au Château (The Tailor in the Castle).

It also co-stars Charles Ruggles as a penniless nobleman, the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze, along with Charles Butterworth and Myrna Loy as members of his family, Count de Savignac and Countess Valentine. C Aubrey Smith and Robert Greig are the other co-stars as Duke d’Artelines and Major Domo Flammand.

Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies, and Blanche Friderici play First, Second and Third Aunt.

Joseph Cawthorn, Bert Roach, Rolfe Sedan, Tyler Brooke, Marion Byron, Cecil Cunningham, George Davis, Mary Doran, Sam Harris, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, George Humbert, Tony Merlom, Herbert Mundin and Edgar Norton also appear.

Love Me Tonight runs 104 minutes but the cut re-release version runs only 96 minutes. Re-released after the censorship Hays Code was initiated in 1934, the edited print cuts Myrna Loy’s reprise of ‘Mimi’ because she sang it wearing a suggestive nightgown. Several other suggestive moments are also cut. The TCM print runs only 89 minutes.

The film was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant in 1990.

After a jealous MacDonald persuaded Loy to give up her white empire-style dress for the party sequence, Loy put together a black lace outfit and stole the scene anyway.

MacDonald is fondly remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Chevalier – The Love Parade, Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow and One Hour With You. Naughty Marietta (1935) brought her together with Nelson Eddy, making made eight movies together as ‘America’s Singing Sweethearts’, and Clark Gable starred with her in San Francisco (1936).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1358

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Rouben Mamoulian directs.