There’s something about Love Me Tonight that brings a tear to one’s eye — as a friend said the other day, it’s perfect, like One Hour With You and Trouble in Paradise. I have a feeling that casual fans might easily confuse Love Me Tonight with an Ernst Lubitsch film, what with the presence of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and the glowing Paramount production values.
But Love Me Tonight is by Rouben Mamoulian, who in 1932 was one of the top names in Hollywood. Lubitsch might have won the charm prize and von Sternberg the exoticism award, but Mamoulian topped them in technical achievement linked to artistic expression. I like to say that Fritz Lang all but single-handedly refined the basic building blocks of the thriller, the spy movie, the social outrage picture. But Lang had little interest in farce comedy, and his one attempt at a musical was ‘interesting’ and little more (it’s actually a little sinister). But Lang and Mamoulian were pioneers in the creative art of sync sound audio, at a time when audio soundtracks could not yet be mixed, or even cut without the edits being blooped to avoid a optical-track ‘pop.’ . A couple of years earlier Rouben Mamoulian’s great achievement Applause had jumped through hoops to overcome these technical limitations, to take early talkies ‘out of the glass booth.’
1932 was Mamoulian’s big year, with two amazingly adroit pictures that greatly expanded the visual and aural vocabulary of early talkies. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens up the horror film to previously untouched cinematic possibilities. But Love Me Tonight expands the musical genre in five ways at once. It is with good reason hailed as the most original and inventive film musical of all time. I would add ‘non-dancing’ to that accolade, without prejudice. Mamoulian applies a new vocabulary of filmic possibilities to unchain the movie musical from its ‘stand there and sing’ limitations. Combine that with wonderful Rodgers and Hart songs and a preCode script packed with suggestive wit, and Love Me Tonight remains an enchanting, liberating experience.
Once again we are in Paris, or its atmospheric recreation constructed on the Paramount back lot. Tailor Maurice Courtelin (Maurice Chevalier) learns how the other half lives when he goes to the chateau of the Duke d’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith) to collect a debt owed by the Duke’s spendthrift, philandering nephew, the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles). Through no deceit of his own, Maurice finds himself passing as a Baron in the highly class-conscious household, where an army of servants sizes him up as well. The nervous bookworm the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth) searches in vain for a ‘Baron Courtelin’ in the royalty registries, while the near-nymphomaniac Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy) is eager to seduce him. But Maurice falls madly in love with Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald), a lonely widow, and slowly wins her to his side. Now, how does Maurice explain to Jeanette that he’s nothing but a tailor? Through an inspired musical number, of course.
I’ve got little choice but to say it again — in this one Mamoulian almost single-handedly invents a new vocabulary for filmic musical possibilities. From the first scene we recognize cinematic inventions that have been imitated, elaborated on, but never done with quite the originality seen here. The picture opens with a musical montage that assembles random city noises (a worker’s pick, a cobbler’s hammer) into an introduction for the first song. The music is not limited to song set-pieces: the music mirrors the players as they run through city streets, ride on horses or ascend stairs in a mansion. A musical chemistry is always primed for a song to commence. We can usually tell when a musical is ‘winding up’ to break into an ordinary scene with a song, but Love Me Tonight makes the transitions feel like magic. Chevalier’s words first slide into subtle rhymes, which then take on an upbeat rhythm that makes bursting into full song feel completely natural.
The second full song introduces the standard Isn’t It Romantic? and turns it into an effortless tour de force. It begins with sarcastic lyrics sung by the low-born Maurice before a three-paneled folding mirror. A La Ronde– like pattern is introduced when a songwriter (Tyler Brooke) overhears the tune and carries it with him into a taxi. He writes more lyrics as he waits for a train with a group of soldiers. The soldiers then adopt the tune as a marching song. A Gypsy boy carries the melody back to his campfire where it becomes a romantic violin piece. Hearing the sweet Gypsy music from the balcony of the Duke’s vast estate, the Princess Jeanette sings the formal lyrics in a full operetta style. Thus Isn’t It Romantic? has shown the creation of a song, established its ‘viral’ effect, and formed a link between two people separated by distance and class boundaries. Maurice doesn’t know that Jeanette exists, and vice-versa. But it’s already fated that they are clearly made for each other. That’s kinda romantic, all right.
Other musical numbers plumb most of the possibilities of filmed performance that will be used for the next 75 years. The tune The Son of a Gun is Nothing But a Tailor rounds up the entire chateau staff to condemn our hero, all contributing a line or two while doing their jobs in different parts of the house. Three old maids form a greek chorus, cheering on the amorous behavior of young Jeanette and Valentine, but waxing apoplectic when told that a lowborn commoner is passing himself off as a baron. The lead biddy is the great Elizabeth Patterson (Intruder in the Dust). She does a lot of frowning in movies but has a beautiful smile here.
Musical stylization doesn’t worry much about ‘realism,’ and Love Me Tonight isn’t afraid to bend the laws of physical reality. In another song, a dog pipes up with a note (in the right key!) and even a bas-relief on a wall chimes in with a lyric. Yet another tune plays out over an image of Maurice sleeping in his bed. An image of the sleeping Jeanette dissolves in next to him, forming a precedent for a visual motif often ascribed to 1959’s Pillow Talk. They’re sleeping together, in spirit! Another oddball musical idea shows stuffy old C. Aubrey Smith bursting out in a romantic song as he wakes in the morning, and the effect is hilarious … we just aren’t used to the mustachio’ed old poop being so animated.
Almost every scene introduces something new. Each ‘trick’ makes its point; nothing is merely a gimmick. We’re surprised when a zoom lens zeroes in on a smokestack in the first scene, and even more intrigued to see a mounted hunting party ‘leave quietly’ by galloping away in slow motion. [ I took a close look at this slow-motion ‘galloping’ scene — it really looks as if the camera changes speed in mid-shot, from normal to slo-mo. I didn’t know that trick was possible back then, that there were vari-speed camera motors. The exposure stays constant. ]
The comedy sticks close to the topics of romantic pursuit and sexual attraction, in a Parisian paradise of pre-Code humor. Spicy and suggestive situations, dialogue and lyrics abound. A shop-keeper’s wife laments that she wants a beau, and when asked about her husband says, “He could use the dough.” Charles Ruggles’ rascally Viscount uses a footrace as camouflage when he’s forced to flee in his underwear from a woman’s boudoir.
Myrna Loy’s delightfully provocative Countess Valentine has a smile that would overcome any male resistance. She’s primed to pounce on any attractive man who comes in the door. When Jeanette faints, Loy is asked if she could go for a doctor. “Certainly!” she answers, “Bring him right in!” The minx-ish Loy originally shared a running gag with the sexless comic relief Charles Ruggles and Charles Butterworth, in which they debate whether or not to “Come see the Virgin’s Spring.”
Ruggles and Butterworth are fine comic foils, coming off much better than they do in some other pre-Codes I’ve seen. Ruggles’ cowardly character is really unwelcome in Murders in the Zoo, for instance. Not a fan of Maurice Chevalier’s later work? He’s still the jaunty boulevardier here, with his lip jutting out, singing songs about Apaches, etc. After WW2 some of the fun left Chevalier because of charges of artistic collaboration during the war — he suddenly wasn’t as popular in France as he had been before.
This not quite the same Jeanette MacDonald that warbled chaste tunes to Nelson Eddy on glossy MGM staircases. Her image is just as saucy as any sex object of the pre-Code period, with scenes that emphasize her naked legs, and other scenes where she and Loy perform in sheer nightgowns, or ballroom gowns that aren’t much more substantial. The movie contrives several situations that keep her only partly dressed. Tailor Maurice even takes her bust measurement, which must have been a provocative moment in 1932. (Top image ↑ ) Suffice to say that Jeanette’s more sensual and less saccharine here than in her (not objectionable) later operettas for MGM.
After the usual misunderstandings and romantic appeals, the disgraced Maurice leaves the chateau. But the previously faint-of-heart Jeanette storms across the countryside on horseback. She defies a locomotive to prevent her lover from escaping back to Paris, even if he is nothing but a tailor. Love Me Tonight ends with love conquering all, and the rest of us realizing that most every musical convention in film and music videos had been pioneered fifty years before.
According to Miles Kreuger, this shot was censored. It would have come about 47 minutes in,