Editing Love Me Tonight

{{Short description|1932 film by Rouben Mamoulian}}
{{Other uses}}
{{Use American English|date=January 2025}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=December 2020}}
{{Infobox film
| name           = Love Me Tonight 
| image          = Love Me Tonight (1932 poster).jpg
| alt            = 
| caption        = Theatrical release poster
| director       = [[Rouben Mamoulian]] 
| writer         = [[Samuel Hoffenstein]]<br>[[George Marion Jr.]]<br>[[Waldemar Young]] 
| starring       = [[Maurice Chevalier]]<br>[[Jeanette MacDonald]]<br>[[Charles Ruggles]]<br>[[Charles Butterworth (actor)|Charles Butterworth]]<br>[[Myrna Loy]] 
| producer       = Rouben Mamoulian
| music = [[Richard Rodgers]] (music) <br> [[Lorenz Hart]] (lyrics)
| cinematography = [[Victor Milner]]
| editing        = Rouben Mamoulian <br> William Shea
| released       = {{Film date|1932|8|18}}
| distributor    = [[Paramount Pictures]]
| runtime        = 89 minutes
| language       = English
| country        = United States
| gross          = $685,000 (U.S. and Canada [[Distributor rental|rentals]])<ref name=GreenBriar>{{Cite web|url=https://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2007/10/you-didnt-have-ice-cream-all-way.html|title=You Didn't Have Ice Cream All The Way Through ... --- Part One|date=October 2, 2007|website=greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com}}</ref>
}}

'''''Love Me Tonight''''' is a 1932 American [[Pre-Code Hollywood|pre-Code]] [[musical comedy]] film produced and directed by [[Rouben Mamoulian]], with music by [[Rodgers and Hart]].  It stars [[Maurice Chevalier]] as a tailor who poses as a nobleman and [[Jeanette MacDonald]] as a princess with whom he falls in love.  It also stars [[Charles Ruggles]] as a penniless nobleman, along with [[Charles Butterworth (actor)|Charles Butterworth]] and [[Myrna Loy]] as members of his family.

The film is an adaptation by [[Samuel Hoffenstein]], [[George Marion Jr.]] and [[Waldemar Young]] of the play ''Le Tailleur au château'' ("The tailor at the castle") by [[Paul Armont]] and [[Léopold Marchand]].<ref>Milne, 1969 p. 162-163: Filmography</ref><ref>Spergel, 1993 p. 278: Filmography and Stageography</ref>

==Plot==
The story describes an encounter between a [[Paris]]ian tailor named Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier) and a family of local [[aristocracy (class)|aristocrat]]s.  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.

[[File:Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in Love Me Tonight.jpg|thumb|left|[[Jeanette MacDonald]] and [[Maurice Chevalier]]]]
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.<ref>[[Stanley Green (historian)|Green, Stanley]] (1999) Hollywood Musicals Year by Year (2nd ed.), pub. Hal Leonard Corporation {{ISBN|0-634-00765-3}} page 17</ref><ref>Milne, 1969 p. 162-163: Filmography</ref><ref>Spergel, 1993 p. 130-131: Plot sketch</ref>

==Cast==
{{div col}}
* [[Maurice Chevalier]] as Maurice, Baron Courtelin
* [[Jeanette MacDonald]] as Princesse Jeanette
* [[Charles Ruggles]] as Vicomte Gilbert de Varèze
* [[Charles Butterworth (actor)|Charles Butterworth]] as Comte de Savignac
* [[Myrna Loy]] as Comtesse Valentine
* [[C. Aubrey Smith]] as the Duc d'Artelines
* [[Elizabeth Patterson (actress)|Elizabeth Patterson]] as First Aunt
* [[Ethel Griffies]] as Second Aunt
* [[Blanche Friderici]] as Third Aunt
* [[Joseph Cawthorn]] as Dr. Armand de Fontinac
* [[Robert Greig]] as Major Domo Flammand
* [[Bert Roach]] as Émile
* [[George 'Gabby' Hayes]] as Grocer
* [[William H. Turner (actor)|William H. Turner]] as Bootmaker 
{{div col end}}

==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>

==Musical numbers==
Source:<ref>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.”</ref><ref>Callahan, 2007: “Love Me Tonight is widely beloved, a pastiche of Ernst Lubitsch musicals with a sumptuous Rodgers and Hart score.”</ref>
* "That's the Song of Paree"
* "[[Isn't It Romantic?]]"
* "[[Lover (Rodgers and Hart song)|Lover]]"
* "[[Mimi (song)|Mimi]]"
* "A Woman Needs Something Like That"
* "I'm an [[Apaches (subculture)|Apache]]"
* "Love Me Tonight"
* "The Son of a Gun Is Nothing but a Tailor"
* "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 from 96 to 89 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.<ref>Richard Barrios. ''A Song in the Dark''.  Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 361-62.</ref>

==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.”<ref>Milne, 1969 p. 53: “Possibly it is simply a question of taste…” And p. 50: “flawless…”</ref><ref>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…”</ref><ref>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.”</ref>

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."<ref>Richard Barrios, "Love Me Tonight", National Film Register Program, p. 1 at https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/love_me_tonight.pdf accessed 2/22/2023</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".

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.<ref>Spergel, 1993 p. 133</ref>
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 film) | Monte Carlo]]'' (1930).<ref>Spergel, 1993 p. 133</ref><ref>Milne, 1969 p. 51: “[O]ne of the most enchanting musicals ever made, the [[Ernst Lubitsch  |  Lubitsch]] film that Lubitsch was always trying to pull of but never quite did.” And p. 53</ref><ref>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</ref> 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.<ref>Jensen, 2024 p. 83: See here for critic James Henry “bravura” description.</ref>

==American Film Institute Lists==
*[[AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs]]:
**'Isn't it Romantic?' - #73

==Home media==
''Love Me Tonight'' was released through [[Kino International (company)|Kino International]] [[DVD]] 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.

==Notes==
{{Reflist}}
==References==
*Callahan, Dan. 2007. "The Strange Case of Rouben Mamoulian". ''[[Slant Magazine]]'', September 4, 2007. https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-strange-case-of-rouben-mamoulian/  Retrieved 19 June, 2024.
*Danks, Adrian. 2007. ''Rouben Mamoulian''. [[Senses of Cinema]], February, 2007. Great Directors Issue 42 https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/mamoulian/Mamoulian, Rouben  Retrieved 19 June, 2024.
*Jensen, Kurt. 2024. ''Peerless: Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood, and Broadway.'' [[University of Wisconsin Press]], Wisconsin Film Studies, Patrick McGilligan, series editor. {{ISBN  | 978-0-299-34820-5}}
*[[Tom Milne  |   Milne, Tom]]. 1969. ''Rouben Mamoulian.'' The Cinema One Series, [[Thames and Hudson]] Limited, London. Catalog no. 500-47012 X
*Spergel, Mark. 1993. ''Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian.'' [[The Scarecrow Press]], Filmmakers series No. 57, [[Anthony Slide]], editor. {{ISBN  |  0-8108-2721-2}}

==External links==
*''Love Me Tonight'' essay [https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/love_me_tonight.pdf] by Richard Barrios on the [[National Film Registry]] website 
*{{IMDb title|0023158}}
*{{TCMDb title|id=82022}}
*{{rotten-tomatoes|id=love_me_tonight|title=Love Me Tonight (1932)}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070927203158/http://www.jeanettemacdonaldandnelsoneddy.com/films/jeanette/jm-loveme.htm 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 {{ISBN|0826429777}}, pages 196-198 [https://books.google.com/books?id=deq3xI8OmCkC]

{{Rouben Mamoulian}}
{{Authority control}}

[[Category:1932 films]]
[[Category:1932 musical comedy films]]
[[Category:American musical comedy films]]
[[Category:American black-and-white films]]
[[Category:1930s English-language films]]
[[Category:American films based on plays]]
[[Category:Paramount Pictures films]]
[[Category:United States National Film Registry films]]
[[Category:Films directed by Rouben Mamoulian]]
[[Category:1930s American films]]
[[Category:English-language musical comedy films]]