LOVE ME TONIGHT: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1932) Kino Lorber

 Few musicals are as revered as Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932), a sassy and exotic class ‘A’ affair about some decided déclassé characters living it up in gay Paree. Hollywood’s pre-Code era was a hotbed for European sophistication. And with a score by Rodgers and Hart, and stars, Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald and Myrna Loy in the driver’s seat (apparently with a bit of ‘un’professional jealousy brewing between the two ladies), the picture cannot help but excel as a soaring anthem to uber-glamor run amok. Chevalier, in particular, was then cresting at the height of his first wave in intercontinental popularity. Already a legend in his native France, Chevalier’s talents spanned the gamut as actor, cabaret singer and all-around entertainer, his acclaim jumping the Channel to London where he proved an even bigger hit with audiences in 1917. A chance meeting with composers, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin preceded his arrival in Hollywood in 1928. Less than a year after his arrival, Chevalier was Oscar-nominated for both The Love Parade (1929) and The Big Pond (1930). This ought to have been the beginning of Chevalier’s ‘golden period’. Alas, WWII intervened and, as Chevalier retreated to his beloved France, harboring a Jewish family in exile, he was investigated, then commanded by the Nazis to perform in Berlin. Ambivalently, he complied, inadvertently to be labeled as ‘a collaborator’ with Germany and later rumored to have been on several Allied hit lists as a traitor. Despite his acquittal on all charges by the French convened court, the American press remained acrimonious toward Chevalier. He was repeatedly denied a visa to perform outside his country and, in Hollywood – at least – remained persona non grata for some time thereafter. And thus, Chevalier was off American movie screen for more than two decades, resurfacing in Billy Wilder’s charming, Love in the Afternoon (1957) and then, to ever-lasting effect as the elegant bon vivant in Vincente Minnelli’s Oscar-winning, Gigi (1958) for which he was given a big – if belated – warm-hearted welcome, receiving an honorary statuette.

An adaptation of Paul Armont and Léopold Marchand’s play, Le Tailleur au château, the screenplay for Love Me Tonight, by Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr. and Waldemar Young, weaves together some fairly risqué dialogue with the plushiest pop tunes of their generation, including the title song, ‘Lover’, ‘Mimi’ and, the iconic, ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ In this latter effort, the picture broke new ground, combining then revolutionary camera work - especially for an early sound era production - with ingenious editing as the song’s lyrics are passed along from one singer to another, then another - each, in a different locale. Given the picture’s ‘overt’ naughtiness (at one point, Chevalier disarmingly disrobes MacDonald’s princess, visibly to enjoy sliding his tape measure up and down around her waist and bosom as he ‘fits’ her for a riding habit), for its 1934 re-issue, Love Me Tonight was shorn of several scenes, mercilessly lost to us for all time, among them, Myrna Loy's reprise of ‘Mimi’ in a slinky/kinky negligee. While the picture did receive approval from the Hays Office prior to production getting underway, Hays sternly insisted the suggestive nature of the song, ‘A Woman Needs Something Like That’ be edited for content. In fact, it remained unaltered by Mamoulian. The line, ‘must we sleep tonight all alone?’ in the title track was changed to ‘let's drink deep tonight all alone’ to appease the censors, while references to a ‘virgin spring’ were completely expunged. Ever-concerned over undue scrutiny, Paramount also sent a copy of the script to the French consul, Henri Didot who made only one suggestion - a scene where the princess strikes her servant be omitted. Nevertheless, Love Me Tonight proved the seventh highest grossing picture of the year - impressive, considering its stiff competition from such bona fide classics as Grand Hotel, Red Dust, Tarzan the Ape Man, The Mummy, The Sign of the Cross, and, What Price Hollywood? – to name but a handful of the heavy hitters competing for their share of success.

Rouben Mamoulian’s reputation in Hollywood has long endured as the purveyor of Euro-urbanity. And yet, Mamoulian would likely have abhorred the inference he was merely aping a style. And, in reassessing his work today, one can acknowledge the finesse applied here is mostly in service to finding his own unique ‘middle ground’ where the chic intercontinental fairy-land of lushly romanticized refinement gets main-streamed to suit Hollywood’s reinvention of it, realized with the aid of a chic good taste, lavishly appointed sets, a sublime cast and about a million dollars burning a hole in his pocket. Mamoulian establishes the picture’s laissez faire attitude toward sex by concentrating on a rather earthy and magnificent profundity to life itself. Love Me Tonight begins as just another day in the heart of France. Paris, deserted at dawn, soon teems with the unpretentious sights and sound of a city at work rather than play. A chimney begins to billow. Bells from the nearby Notre Dame chime. A burly workman with a pick axe endeavors a back-breaking construction job in the middle of the street. From every window, life stirs; chambermaids, empty their dust bins or hang laundry on elevated clothes lines. Herein, Mamoulian makes us aware of the sounds as well as the sights; stiff broom bristles swishing on cobblestone, a shoemaker’s peg being driven through an old pair of shoes, and so on.   

From this seemingly inauspicious debut, we draw nearer the cramped bedroom of Chevalier’s tailor – aptly named, ‘Maurice’ Courtelin. The city’s noise is music to his proletariat ears, and from this moment forward, Mamoulian invests every ounce of planning to ensure this magical genuineness he has cleverly concocted – seemingly from thin air, and appearing so unrehearsed – never breaks its stride. If Mamoulian’s first love and greatest strengths are as a ‘stage director’, then Love Me Tonight evolves into one of the most unusual moving tableaus ever put on film, the awareness of blending score to picture, so as never to jar song from dialogue and vice versa, springs forth from Lorenz Hart’s inventive colloquialism. This only appears to have been achieved ‘off the cuff’. Actually, it is the result of some spellbinding meticulous planning.  And Mamoulian here is playing to the strength of his stars – not the least, in parceling off Jeanette MacDonald’s patrician beauty to only a handful of scenes in which she either remains effectively at the mercy of Chevalier’s Gaelic charisma, or better still, is allowed to trill the Rodgers and Hart songs without fracturing the cream of the jest, left squarely to rest on her co-star’s shoulders.  

Mamoulian’s tongue-in-cheek embrace of ‘sin’ is admirably carried out to its absurd ends by the supporting cast: Joseph Cawthorne, the inscrutable, C. Aubrey Smith, Elizabeth Patterson, and, most affectingly, by the great Charles Ruggles, as the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze, who knows his way around a well-timed reaction of sheepish befuddlement. Even Myrna Loy’s pertness gets softened, and much to the good of her over-sexed Countess Valentine. By 1932, it would be incorrect to suggest Love Me Tonight is a movie to have first broken from the primitiveness for which far too many early ‘sound’ pictures nevertheless continued to suffer – the camera, static, the players, even more so, and the songs in a musical (one of the most popular genres, then) merely wedged between bits of exposition, meant to connect the dots in the most superficial understanding of narratively structured plot from one song to the next. And, in fact, Love Me Tonight skillfully skirts past virtually every anticipated pitfall of the early sound era, placing Chevalier and MacDonald at the apex of a plushily padded Ruritanian charade that then becomes the benefactor of Mamoulian’s master class in staging and camera work par excellence.

In short order, Mamoulian offers us the only thumbnail we need to be dazzled by what follows; Chevalier’s tailor, struggling to make a reputation for himself, but assured prominence and patronage from the ‘respectable’ class once the Viscount is able to pay for his order of two-dozen suits. Problem: Varèze is penniless. He is also considered something of a ‘black sheep’ by his uncle, the Duke d'Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith). Thus, when Maurice arrives at the Duke’s chateau to collect on his bill, the Viscount attempts to diffuse the reason for his visit by passing him off as a Baron, presumably with romantic designs on the Duke’s widowed niece, Princess Jeanette (MacDonald), and, much to the chagrin of her ill-starred suitor, the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth). Further complicating matters is the Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy) – oversexed, and after Maurice from the outset. All of this lovable nonsense is observed with a critical eye by ‘the gossips’ (Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies, Blanche Frederici). After much consternation, a spirited stag hunt (double entendre, indeed!), and, the exposure of Maurice’s true identity, the Princess predictably has her change of heart. She tears after the departing tailor, placing herself in direct peril from an oncoming train that – no kidding – is stopped in mid-chug by the sheer will of her striking devotion to Maurice. The two are reunited and embrace – true love, predictably, to have conquered all.

Until this standard denouement, Love Me Tonight has many atypical decadences to disclose; Mamoulian’s tasteful nub of pace and comedic timing, Chevalier’s infinitely professional and occasionally hammy good humor, MacDonald’s sublime trilling of the score, some striking sets by art director, Hans Dreiser, and Victor Milner’s absolutely sumptuous B&W cinematography, made richer still by Mamoulian’s striking and aggressive deployment of image dissolves and overlaps. In all, Mamoulian achieves a sort of agility and perfection in his camera movements that, even by today’s standards and technological wizardry, remains monumentally impressive, and, placed in the context of their own time, were nothing less than ground-breaking. And let us not set aside the picture’s extraordinary score, ranging from intimate ballads to intricately interwoven and plot-advancing spectacles. Of these, ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ ranks as a watershed achievement. Important to note, the lyrics here bear only a passing resemblance to the song most would come to know as a sublime jukebox tome for decades thereafter. Herein, the lyrics are more saucy and self-deprecating as Maurice’s jaded deliberations on love are passed along, first to his client, Emile (Bert Roach), then a nearby cabbie, soldiers on a train, a crew of gypsies, and finally, wafting majestically through open windows at the chateau where the Princess reinvents its meaning as quixotic longing – a beautifully ‘stylized’ moment from Mamoulian.

In all, Love Me Tonight represents a benchmark in musical comedy whose innovations have long since been adopted, assimilated, and, on occasion, mutilated by other directors aspiring to achieve such mesmerizing integration of story and song. But perhaps the picture’s greatest triumph has nothing at all to do with its technical proficiencies; rather, in Mamoulian’s ability to hew genuine and charismatic performances from his two stars. Chevalier here eschews his throaty argot for a more finessed characterization, shorn of its trademarked surreptitious-if-extroverted ‘above it all’ joie de vivre.  As for MacDonald, soon – and forever after to be nicknamed ‘the iron butterfly’ (one half of the operatic screen team featuring Nelson Eddy, rechristened as ‘the singing capon’), herein, she balances a plentiful tremolo with a performance of sustained sexual frustration. In all, Love Me Tonight’s enduring legacy remains its daring experimentalism in virtually every facet of its design. There is nothing ‘traditional’ about it; the picture’s vast storehouse of virtues gilded by a superlative spate of moral ambiguity, devilishly impertinent dialogue and situations plied with titillating and raucous amounts of misdirection; the only ‘universal’ exercised - Mamoulian’s own recognition, that in musicals, the best way to express sexual longing, frustrations, and penultimate orgasmic satisfaction is by breaking out in song.

Love Me Tonight arrives on Blu-ray in a sparkling 4K remaster from Universal (thanks to Paramount’s short-sighted sell-off in the mid-50’s, the present-day custodians of all their vintage product), via its alliance with Kino Lorber.  We need to give credit where it is due, as the movie has NEVER looked better on home video, with a renewed luster that belies its nearly 90-year vintage. Uni has clearly put their best efforts on this deep catalog release and the results are stunningly handsome. The gray scale has been expertly balanced. Blacks are deep and velvety. Whites are pristine. Film grain looks marvelously indigenous to its source. Contrast is perfect. Age-related artifacts have been expunged without any of digital tinkering to create waxy, artificially enhanced images. What’s here is absolutely gorgeous. Even dissolves, fades and overlaps reveal a stunning level of clarity. So, prepare to be dazzled. The 1.0 mono DTS is, likewise, a revelation, sporting an aural clarity with virtually zero hiss or pop. Everything about this 1080p transfer is a top-tier effort. Extras include a comprehensive audio commentary from historian, founder and president of the Institute of the American Musical - Miles Kreuger, two musical shorts – Chevalier singing ‘Louise’ and MacDonald reprising ‘Love Me Tonight’ – excerpts from the screenplay, to include scenes deleted from the final cut, production notes and censorship footnotes, plus, a badly worn theatrical trailer – proof positive, Uni had its work cut out in restoring this movie. Bottom line: Love Me Tonight is a watershed musical that now appears decades younger, thanks to this restored hi-def rendering. It belongs on the top-shelf of ‘must haves’ for anyone who considers his/herself a connoisseur of film art. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

3.5