Love Me Tonight (1932)

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

For what it is worth, here is a bit of "Americana". I found a letter from my father to my mother written on September 11, 1932 ,(nine years before they were married, by the way). In it he mentioned having gone to see this film. His review is as follows..."I went to see Maurice Chevalier tonight in his latest, 'Love Me Tonight'. Say, I have more technique than that guy, any night. He is losing all he had, can I give him pointers?".I had to correct some spellings errors in the quote, otherwise IMDb wouldn't accept it. Pity. That way it loses a bit of the flavor and intention of a "Quote"I take it that my Dad liked the movie.

There have been better film directors than Rouben Mamoulian and better stage directors as well. But no one has yet mastered both of those mediums so much so that his services to helm a project was in demand consistently in Broadway and Hollywood. Mamoulian certainly has his share of duds on both coasts, but he has his share of classics as well and none is more classic than Love Me Tonight.Love Me Tonight is the third and best collaboration with leads Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Chevalier is but a poor tailor, the best at his craft who's just completed a big order for a rakish nobleman played by Charlie Ruggles. Ruggles is also a deadbeat who's stiffed half the merchants of Paris and they've appointed Chevalier a committee of one to settle the accounts. Off goes Chevalier to the countryside to get Ruggles to cough up.Ruggles is mooching off his titled uncle C. Aubrey Smith and while nobility has been formally abolished in France, it's still held in regard in class conscious Europe. When Maurice gets to Smith's palatial digs, he also finds another cousin in Jeanette MacDonald and she falls big for him of course. And Ruggles not wanting to seem more of a deadbeat and a moocher than C. Aubrey Smith already thinks he is, introduces Chevalier as another titled fellow.Two other main characters get into this mix. Charles Butterworth who is also a titled person and would like to marry Jeanette. Of course Butterworth isn't her romantic ideal, like he'd be anybody's. And Jeanette has a lady in waiting in Myrna Loy who's also got her eye on Maurice.There are many who consider this the best musical ever made. It certainly was years ahead of its time. In fact Maurice and Jeanette were fortunate to also have Ernst Lubitsch directing their other features because they too were considered way ahead of their time and helped their careers along immensely.One reason for the success of Love Me Tonight is the score written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, probably their best film score. When you've got such classics as Isn't It Romantic, Lover, and Mimi all in the same film, you can't miss.One should also hear Chevalier's RCA recording of Mimi. It was one of the staple songs of his career. The record however has an interlude as Maurice reminisces about all the other girls he's sung about like Louise, Valentina, Mitzi, and his fabulous Love Parade. But no doubt about it, Mimi tops them all. I wish he could have used those lyrics in the film.As for Lover this is a case of a hit song becoming far bigger in revival. Jeanette sings it on screen, but I would safely venture that more people identify the song with Peggy Lee and hit record she made of it in the Fifties. In fact a lot of her contemporaries also started recording it during that decade and Lover had a new burst of popularity then.What amazes me about Rouben Mamoulian is that here was a man who directed such things as Oklahoma, Carousel, Lost In The Stars and Porgy and Bess on stage and then could go to the screen and do classics like Love Me Tonight, Blood and Sand, The Mark Of Zorro, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This man had a complete sense of the cinema, if you find any staged awkwardness in any of his films, I'm not aware of it. The staging of Isn't It Romantic where Maurice and all his neighbors and friends join in and then switching to Jeanette expressing her longing for real romance is perfect. As is the hunting scene which is something that could never be contemplated doing on stage. And Maurice saving the stag probably got him a lifetime appreciation award from PETA.Love Me Tonight after almost 80 years still holds up well and it's a great opportunity for young people today to see and appreciate the lost art of the film musical.

At first glance, this will be a waste of time for you, if you are like me. Its an early musical, about a particularly vapid sort of love, and featuring the most repellent of French values. It has actors that generally are weak, and songs that never mattered.But its wonderful, because it is wonderfully constructed. It is in fact one of the first films to enhance the vocabulary of the camera by allowing it to move in a way that through edits is orchestrated. It doesn't yet have curiosity or intent. Its purely without emotion or meaning, something that would be impossible today. Today, no camera movement or perspective can be used without carrying an association. Here, it is allowed to just be decorative.The movie's story is about a man whose entire focus is dressing, who fails in love with a woman at first glance because of her appearance. You will fall in love with this because of its appearance, in fact precisely because it has no inner soul. Its pure cinema in ways that Brakhage never could know.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

066: Love Me Tonight (1932) - released 8/17/06; viewed 6/17/06.DOUG: We put this movie on our agenda because of its song, "Isn't it Romantic?" which made the AFI's Top 100 Songs list. I'm rather glad we did, since it's the first real musical on the odyssey. It's also an excellent look at the great romancin' French gentleman actor Maurice Chevalier. It's the first time we've seen Chevalier for real (we caught a glimpse of his picture in the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business). In researching Chevalier and the Marx Brothers, I found that none of the brothers is tall enough to pass himself off as Chevalier. We have here a film about the old class boundary: Young heiress Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald) suffers from fainting spells and overprotective relatives, and needs a husband (hey, it's a 30's romance, go with it) her own age, but her Dad keeps trying to set her up with these rich old geezers. Fortunately, along comes Maurice, a tailor who is mistaken for a baron and falls in love with Jeanette. I love, LOVE the scene with Maurice and Jeanette under the tree, when they're telling each other they love each other. There's a lot of odd whimsy in the movie; What's with the scene where Jeanette's aunts are making that witch's brew to cure her fainting spells? Myrna Loy pops up (two years before The Thin Man), and she's quite a pleasure, but we don't see nearly enough of her. Whenever I need to remember what a French accent sounds like, I can just think of Chevalier's voice. If you'd like to have an idea of who Maurice Chevalier was, you might as well start with Love Me Tonight. KEVIN: Five years after the "birth" of sound film and Hollywood has finally established a mastery of music in film. I looooooooooooooooved this movie. I give it 4 out of 5, only because it's not quite memorable enough to garner that fifth star. We have another case of mistaken identity as Maurice Chevalier plays a tailor who poses as a Baron. The first thing I noticed about Chevalier is that he has the best French accent ever. I can't wait to see more of him in Lubitsch's The Merry Widow. Chevalier was 43 at the time, but he doesn't look a day over 35. I enjoyed the randomness of the musical scenes, like in a scene straight out of MacBeth where Jeanette's aunts make a remedy for their niece's fainting spells. My favorite song was "Mimi" the way it's so sweet sounding, yet so very naughty. Director Rouben Mamoulian does some more cool stuff here that seems more at home in a musical than in Jekyll & Hyde. He uses close ups, superimposed images and other cool tricks to advance the emotion of the love story. He also makes every musical scene different. Such as the reprise of "Love Me Tonight" when we just see Maurice and Jeanette sleeping while the song plays and their voices profess their love for each other. Myrna Loy is a pleasure, except for the fact that she doesn't do anything! And for the record, the Marx brothers don't look like Maurice Chevalier.Last film: Movie Crazy (1932). Next film: Blonde Venus (1932).