Love Me Tonight (Paramount, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was looking for something special for last night’s movie and I found it in a Blu-Ray I just ordered of one of my very favorite movies of all time, Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 musical masterpiece Love Me Tonight, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Actually the billing on the title card reads “Maurice Chevalier in Love Me Tonight, a Rouben Mamoulian Production, with Jeanette MacDonald,” and some of the later billing gets even weirder: the next three cast members are Charlie Ruggles, Charles Butterworth and Myrna Loy, in that order. (Loy was still stuck in that odd part of her career when she was being typecast as nymphomaniacs, usually Oriental ones – she had a slight slant to her eyes that someone thought made her look Asian, so her name got changed from Myrna Williams to Myrna Loy because it sounded Chinese – though at least in this film she’s a literately-written nympho with lines like, asked if she ever thinks about anything but men, she replies, “Yes – schoolboys!”). I’ve sometimes astounded my film-buff friends by proclaiming Love Me Tonight as the greatest movie musical ever made (the usual consensus for that title is Singin’ in the Rain, a film I love dearly but I like Love Me Tonight even better). One of the people who thought so was Arthur Freed, the great musical producer at MGM in the 1940’s and 1950’s, who kept a print of Love Me Tonight in his office and showed it to his new hires as an example of what he wanted from them.

By 1932, when Love Me Tonight was made, Paramount had already made a number of successful films with Chevalier and had built him into an enormous star – something I remember learning in a bizarre way from a late-1960’s or early-1970’s telecast of Jeopardy! (when Art Fleming, not Alex Trebek, was still the host) in which the Final Jeopardy clue was, “The top movie male sex symbol between Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable,” and the correct answer was, “Who was Maurice Chevalier?” (Actually, a good case could also be made for Ronald Colman.) That was jarring because the Chevalier I knew was the one who appeared on TV and in films like Gigi and Fanny, the avuncular old French guy who when he got to make a movie was usually the older and wiser confidant of the hero. It was hard thinking of him as a sex symbol, and quite frankly it’s still a bit tough; Chevalier was certainly easy on the eyes, but even as young as he is here he doesn’t come off exactly like passion’s plaything. Though he learned to speak English well enough he never lost that weird accent which Charles described as “a cross between Charles Boyer and Pepe le Pew,” and when he and Boyer appeared together in Fanny their accents were so strange I had to keep reminding myself that they were really French people. Two of the Chevalier-MacDonald films had been directed by Ernst Lubitsch, but he begged off of doing the next one and Mamoulian got assigned to it.

“They called me in and asked me to do it,” Mamoulian told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in 1969. “They said they had no book, no theme, and I’d have to find one in a hurry because they had the tw9 stars on $5000 a week, there was no picture and the money was mounting up.” At first he tried to turn it down, and when he was talked into it he ran into a writer named Leopold Marchand, who had an idea for a story about a French tailor in Paris who goes to a chateau owned by one of France’s old noble families to collect a bill for a scapegrace aristocrat’s clothes. Once there he’s mistaken for a fellow aristocrat and fêted. He falls in love with a princess whose family won’t marry anyone of equivalent rank – the last husband they found for her was a septuagenarian who not surprisingly made her a widow within a year, and now the only men considered of equivalent rank to hers are 85 and 12. The first writers on the project after Marchand outlined the basic story were Jazz Singer scripter Samson Raphaelson, Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young. Mamoulian brought in Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, who’d written the adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that had been Mamoulian’s immediately previous film,

The story they came up with casts Chevalier as Maurice Courtelin (for some reason both Chevalier and MacDonald play characters with their own first names), who’s sent to the baronial palace of the Duke D’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith, who’s so ineluctably British he looks strange as a French aristocrat, but we’ll let that pass) to collect on the debts the duke’s scapegrace nephew Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles) has run up to him and his suppliers. The film opens – stunningly – with a “city symphony” sequence showing the early dawn hours of Paris and people gradually going to work or opening up their shops before the camera (by Victor Milner, whose work is superb throughout – he even manages the neat trick of making Jeanette MacDonald look like the redhead she really was even though the film is in black-and-white) tracks into a tailor’s shop and we know it’s Our Star’s from the straw hat hanging on the wall even before we see him. (Chevalier’s straw hat was already that iconic a part of his image.) Mamoulian got the “city symphony” idea when he was directing DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy about African-American life in Charleston, South Carolina, and he worked out a montage of sights and sounds representing the early morning hours in Catfish Row, the Black neighborhood in which the story takes place. (When George Gershwin turned Heyward’s play into the opera Porgy and Bess, with Mamoulian once again directing, he experimented again with the “city symphony” idea even though it didn’t really fit with Gershwin’s music – though that hasn’t stopped producers since from trying it too.)

When Maurice and his fellow creditors plot out their mission to send him to the Duke’s palace (one of the most stunning sets ever created for a film, even though the exterior is obviously just a model), Maurice starts singing a song called “Isn’t It Romantic?” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and the song is picked up successively by his driver, a songwriter who writes the tune down, a passing platoon of French soldiers on maneuvers, and finally to Jeanette MacDonald as Princess Jeanette, hearing it from her bedroom where she’s just been put to rest after a fainting spell. Mamoulian said the idea came “from a story my grandmother told me, about a prince who finds a piece of embroidery blown by the wind over seven seas and seven lands, and says that whoever made it must be his wife” – only since the film was a musical, instead of making it a piece of cloth, he made a song unite them. Mamoulian and his writers – including Lorenz Hart – thus went Oscar Hammerstein II one better; Hammersteiin had invented a gimmick he called the “conditional love song,” in which a man and a woman who’ve just met imagine themselves in a loving relationship. In Love Me Tonight, “Isn’t It Romantic?” establishes a connection between the romantic leads and tells us they’re meant for each other even though they haven’t actually met.

Throughout the movie Mamoulian and his writers (especially Hoffenstein, whom I suspect was the prime mover behind this script and its innovative ideas), work against the clichés of the musical that were already forming by 1932. The Chevalier and MacDonald characters meet in open country – her horse-drawn carriage has tipped over and his car has broken down (earlier she had been shown singing the song “Lover” as she was driving her carriage, and Hart incorporated her instructions to the horse in his lyric). She runs over Chevalier’s straw hat on the ground, but not to worry: to the astonishment of his driver, he’s got a hatbox full of them. Later on the duet between Chevalier and MacDonald on the title song takes place in the story as they’re both asleep, each dreaming of the other. Not all the songs in Love Me Tonight are that closely integrated into the action, but when Mamoulian and his writers decide just to have Chevalier start singing at the flimsiest of pretexts, they’re clearly making fun of the musical convention. One of the film’s most astonishing moments is a scene in which Chevalier, entertaining at a party given by the aristocrats, disguises himself as an apache (a sort of low-level Parisian street thug famous for beating up their girlfriends; the so-called “apache dance,” in which a man literally throws his dancing partner across the stage and otherwise pantomimes roughing her up, appeared in a lot of movies in the 1920’s and 1930’s) – and not only is Chevalier dressed as the proletarian we know he is but the characters (except for Ruggles’) don’t but Milner hardens his lighting on Chevalier’s face so much he looks chiseled and considerably tougher than in the rest of the movie. Given what Mamoulian’s previous film had been, we almost expect him to change to Mr. Hyde before our eyes!

Love Me Tonight is also one of three quite intriguing movies of the early 1930’s in which much of the dialogue was written in rhyming couplets and spoken by the actors in singsong-like cadences. Other movies of the period that used rhyming dialogue included The Hot Heiress (1931) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!(1933), and it’s worth noting that though these films all had different directors and screenwriters, they all had Rodgers and Hart as songwriters – suggesting that they (Hart in particular) had artistic input into the dialogue sections of these films instead of just turning out songs for them. A number of viewers have been “thrown” by Love Me Tonight because the lyrics to “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Lover” aren’t the familiar ones we hear when the songs are performed out of context. That’s because Hart thought his original lyrics wouldn’t make sense apart from the film, so he just wrote new ones for the published versions.

Love Me Tonight seems to me to be a movie that works on every conceivable level: the direction, the writing, the cast, the production values and the overall insouciance of the piece, its frank acceptance that a musical is inherently an unrealistic form of entertainment. It’s a movie that at once follows the musical conventions and achieves some of its most dazzling effects by breaking them – as witness the fact that the two leads are merely dreaming their big love scene together (and Mamoulian wisely avoids a fantasy sequence and instead just shows them in separate beds in separate bedrooms via a diagonally split screen). There’s also the magnificent hunting scene that was blatantly ripped off in Auntie Mame 24 years later, in which Chevalier is deliberately put on an unrideable horse by his rival for Jeanette’s hand, the Count de Sevignac (Charles Butterworth at his most droll), who’s gone through all 36 volumes of the guide to the French nobility and hasn’t found a “Courtelin” anywhere. He puts Maurice on a horse called “Solitude,” so named because he’s so impossible to ride “he always comes back alone,” only when they find Maurice during the hunt he’s holed up in a cabin with the prey (a deer) and pleads with the hunters to leave them alone because the poor stag wants its rest. (Maurice Chevalier, animal-rights advocate. Who knew?) He bids them all leave quietly so as not to wake the deer, and they obligingly do so in slow motion – yet another example of the cheeky spirit behind this movie, the way it tells its audience, “Yes, we know you’re watching a movie. We certainly don’t expect you to take any of this seriously!”

I also liked the way Maurice is “outed” as just a tailor instead of a nobleman: he insists on retailoring a riding habit that’s been made up for Jeanette and when he’s done she says, “It’s good … too good,” and she catches on to who he really is because he’s just too competent in his real work. And there’s the bizarre trio of aunts (Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies and Blanche Friderici) who at first look like parodies of the Three Witches in Macbeth, but also turn out to have a plot function and even show up at the end to declare the happy ending – which comes about in a scene as audacious as the rest of the movie: Maurice, driven out of the castle in disgrace (though at least he’s collected on the bills he was there to be paid on), gets on the train to Paris. Jeanette, determined to get him at whatever cost, literally chases down the train on her horse and tries in vain to get the driver to stop and let her on. When he won’t, she parks herself across the tracks and stands there like a conquering heroine, and the engineer finally has to stop and let her take the train. The ending of Love Me Tonight marks it as one of those bizarre reverse-Cinderella stories Hollywood was making lately – the aristocratic woman falls in love with a proletarian man but must descend to his economic and social level to have him – which I think started with Cecil B. DeMille’s Dynamite (1929) and also included the aforementioned The Hot Heiress – but that rather classist (and arguably sexist) ending doesn’t mar this movie.

A lot of times when you watch an old favorite movie it disappoints you and you wonder what you saw in it way back when – but not this one: Love Me Tonight is just as fresh, inventive, dazzling and just plain entertaining as it ever was. And there’s a curious and rather tragic postlude to this movie; in the early 1960’s a team of Broadway producers put together a live musical intending for Jeanette MacDonald to star. They wrote a song for her to sing, “Wasn’t It Romantic”,” in which her character from Love Me Tonight would look back on her life and she would sing live in counterpoint to a showing of the film clip of her singing “Isn’t It Romantic?” from this movie – but by the time the show was written MacDonald was already terminally ill with cancer, the show was never produced and “Wasn’t It Romantic?” remained in the vaults until Michael Feinstein dredged it up and recorded it in 1988.