The story describes an encounter between a Parisian tailor named Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier) and a family of local aristocrats. These include Vicomte Gilbert de Varèze (Ruggles), who owes Maurice a large amount of money for tailoring work; Gilbert's uncle the Duc d'Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith), the family patriarch; d'Artelines' man-hungry niece Valentine (Loy); and his other 22-year-old niece, Princesse Jeanette (MacDonald), who has been a widow for three years. D'Artelines has been unable to find Jeanette a new husband of suitable age and rank. The household also includes three aunts and an ineffectual suitor the Comte de Savignac (Butterworth).
Maurice custom-tailors clothing for de Varèze on credit, but the Vicomte's unpaid tailoring bills become intolerable, so Maurice travels to d'Artelines’ castle to collect the money owed to him. On the way, he has a confrontation with Princesse Jeanette. He immediately professes his love for her, but she haughtily rejects him.
When Maurice arrives at the castle, Gilbert introduces him as "Baron Courtelin" in order to hide the truth from the Duc. Maurice is fearful of this scheme at first, but changes his mind when he sees Jeanette. While staying at the castle, he arouses Valentine's desire, charms the rest of the family except for Jeanette, saves a deer's life during a hunt, and continues to woo Jeanette. The Comte de Savignac discovers that Maurice is a fake, but the Vicomte then claims that Maurice is a royal who is traveling incognito for security reasons. Finally, Jeanette succumbs to Maurice's charms, telling him "Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are, I love you."
When Maurice criticizes Jeanette's tailor, the family confronts him for his rudeness, only to catch him and Jeanette alone with Jeanette partially undressed. Maurice explains that he is redesigning Jeanette's riding outfit, and he proves this by successfully altering it, but in the process he is forced to reveal his true identity. Despite her earlier promise, Jeanette recoils from him and runs to her room on hearing that he is a commoner. The entire household is outraged, and Maurice leaves. However, as a train carries him back to Paris, Jeanette struggles with her fears, finally realizes her mistake, and catches up to the train on horseback. When the engineer refuses to stop the train, she rides ahead and stands on the track. The train stops, Maurice jumps out, and the two lovers embrace as steam from the train envelops them.[4][5][6]
This was Rodgers and Hart's second motion picture. In 1930, dealing with losses from the stock market collapse in 1929, they accepted a lucrative three-picture contract from Jack Warner and went to Hollywood. Unfortunately the film they were assigned had one star who couldn't sing and another with a very limited range, so they were limited in what they could write. When the film flopped in 1931, Warner quickly bought out their contract.[7]
Later the same year, Paramount Publix, now Paramount Pictures, hired then to work on this film with singing stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette McDonald and innovative director Reuben Mamoulian, a recent immigrant from Armenia who had directed the play Porgy on Broadway three years earlier.
Working together the director and songwriters "devised a singular method of staging a musical film using a previously underutilized tool: the camera itself,"[8] biographer Todd S. Purdum writes. Rodgers explained, "What we had in mind was not only moving the camera and the performers, but having the entire scene move. There was no reason why a musical sequence could not be used like dialogue and be performed uninterrupted while the action took the story to whatever locations the director wanted."[9]
Mamoulian opened the film, as he had Porgy, with "a steadily growing symphony of everyday sounds as Paris awakens,"[10] what Chevalier's character calls "The Song of Paris." Barrios describes the opening in detail: "As a bell tolls on the soundtrack, a series of shots show Paris in the early morning, each edit hitting with a chime. The camera focuses on a sleepy district where a laborer strikes the pavement with his pickax. Cut to a bum snoring in an alley, then a chairwoman sweeping a front step. Thump, snore, swish, and as more people begin their day the sounds grow in number and rhythm, the editing faster and more percussive. Clearly there’s a master in charge and his name is Mamoulian."[11]
Purdum describes the next highlight: A few minutes later, as a brief scene of tailor Chevalier and a customer ends, "he launches into one of Rodgers and Hart’s all-time great ballads, Isn’t It Romantic? Seamlessly, without a break, the scene shifts (as does the song) from the tailor, to the customer, to a passing taxi driver and his fare, to soldiers on a troop train, to a gypsy boy who overhears them, to a campfire where the music swells to the strains of gypsy violins, to the bedchamber of Princess Jeanette (played by Jeanette MacDonald) ... The lyrics—really snatches of rhyming sung dialogue—are so perfectly suited to the action that Hart had to write a more generic alternative for the published sheet music." Mamoulian's pathbreaking technique was so successful that it has been used in complicated song and dance sequences ever since.[12]
In addition to Isn’t It Romantic, the film features the classic Rodgers and Hart songs "Love Me Tonight", "Mimi", and "Lover". "Lover" is sung not romantically, as it often is in nightclubs, but comically, as MacDonald's character tries to control an unruly horse.
In his book Hollywood in the Thirties, John Baxter wrote, “If there is a better musical of the Thirties, one wonders what it can be.”[13] In 1990, Love Me Tonight was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[14][15]
"The Man for Me" (dropped before the film was released)
"Give Me Just a Moment" (deleted before the film was completed)
Post-1934 censorship
For the post-Production Code (Breen Office) re-release (after 1934), Love Me Tonight was trimmed to 96 minutes. The missing eight minutes of footage have never been restored and are presumed lost. Known deletions include Myrna Loy's portion of the "Mimi" reprise, as under the strictures of the Production Code, her negligee was deemed too revealing.[18]
Retrospective appraisal
The film has been “dismissed” by a number of critics as an inferior facsimile of Paramount directors Ernst Lubitsch and Malcolm St. Clair. Film historian Tom Milne argues that, on the contrary, Mamoulian “left his masters far behind” inventing “a delicious parody” while Lubitsch’s handling of similar narratives “is merely romantic pastiche.” Milne considers it Mamoulian’s “first flawless masterpiece.”[19][20][21]
Film critic Richard Barrios calls Love Me Tonight "magical, rapturous, unique, charming, audacious, unforgettable, and, to beat a warhorse, masterpiece." He adds, "It remains less well-known than it warrants even as vastly inferior works are enshrined. . . . It is, after all, quite a provable truth: Love Me Tonight is a great film, and along with Singin' in the Rain and a very few others it resides at the very pinnacle of movie musicals, and at the apex of art."[22] In 1990, Love Me Tonight was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Biographer Marc Spergel notes a number of the devices Mamoulian brings to bear: “fast-and-slow motion, striking facial close-ups, and shadow-play.” Additionally, the exhibit shows the “montage style” of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in a number of sequences, notably the final chase scene between equestrian and locomotive.[23]
Momoulian crafted the Love Me Tonight as a stylistic and thematic parody of those critically acclaimed films directed by Ernst Lubitsch in which Chevalier and MacDonald had recently appeared: The Love Parade (1929) and Monte Carlo (1930).[24][25][26] whereas Lubitsch’s work is distinguished by its restraint and intimacy, a no less impressive achievement. Mamoulian’s directing delivers a cinematically “bravura” treatment of the material.[27]
Love Me Tonight was released through Kino InternationalDVD on November 25, 2003. Extra features included screenplay excerpts of deleted scenes, audio commentary by Miles Kreuger (Founder and President of the Institute of the American Musical, Inc. and also a good friend of Rouben Mamoulian), production documents, censorship records, and performances from Maurice Chevalier (Louise) and Jeanette MacDonald (Love Me Tonight) from the 1932 short Hollywood on Parade. There are no existing pre-Code uncensored versions of the original film.
^Danks, 2007: “...Love Me Tonight is the film most often cited as evidence of either Mamoulian’s cinematic genius or the inflated, superficial qualities of his work.
^Milne, 1969 p. 162-163: Filmography, p. 51: The musical numbers “brilliantly integrated into the witty script that they are all but inseparable from it.”
^Callahan, 2007: “Love Me Tonight is widely beloved, a pastiche of Ernst Lubitsch musicals with a sumptuous Rodgers and Hart score.”
^Richard Barrios. A Song in the Dark. Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 361-62.
^Milne, 1969 p. 53: “Possibly it is simply a question of taste…” And p. 50: “flawless…”
^Danks, 2007: “Mamoulian made two films at Paramount – Love Me Tonight and Song of Songs (1933) – that are often compared to the contemporaneous work done at the studio by Ernst Lubitsch…”
^Callahan, 2007: “Some writers have judged it as better than Lubitsch, or as the film Lubitsch was always striving to make. These conclusions don’t hold up to even a cursory scrutiny of their respective work…In Love Me Tonight, Mamoulian employs endless camera gimmicks (zooms, slow motion, etc.), but this is not the same as having a style, or even a touch.”
^Milne, 1969 p. 51: “[O]ne of the most enchanting musicals ever made, the Lubitsch film that Lubitsch was always trying to pull of but never quite did.” And p. 53
^Jensen, 2024 p. 3: The film’s “lush rhythmic style…”And :Love Me Tonight is a veritable tour-de-force combining “visual imagery, rhythm, and wit
^Jensen, 2024 p. 83: See here for critic James Henry “bravura” description.
Love Me Tonight at Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy: A Tribute
Love Me Tonight essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN0826429777, pages 196-198 [2]
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