Editing Love Me Tonight (section)

==Production==
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 L. Warner|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.<ref>Todd S. Purdum, ''Something Wonderful:  Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution'', Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2018, p. 56</ref>

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 Rouben 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,"<ref>Purdum, p. 57</ref> 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."<ref>Purdum, p. 57</ref>

Mamoulian opened the film, as he had ''Porgy'', with "a steadily growing symphony of everyday sounds as Paris awakens,"<ref>Purdum, p. 57</ref> 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."<ref>Barrios, pp. 1-2</ref>

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.<ref>Purdum, pp. 57-58</ref>

In addition to ''Isn’t It Romantic'', the film features the classic Rodgers and Hart songs "Love Me Tonight", "[[Mimi (song)|Mimi]]", and "[[Lover (Rodgers and Hart song)|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.”<ref>The Films and Career of Maurice Chevalier (Gene Ringgold, Dewitt Bodeen, The Citadel Press, 1973), {{ISBN|0-8065-0354-8}}. P.110.</ref> 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".<ref>{{Cite web|title=Complete National Film Registry Listing |url=https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/|website=Library of Congress|access-date=May 5, 2020}}</ref><ref>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.</ref>