Tailor Made Man
Love Me Tonight was produced and directed by the forgotten movie magic maestro Rouben Mamoulian, a name who doesn’t make the history books compared to the likes of Orson Welles but who’s work during the pre-code era deserve that cliché expression, “ahead of its time” – films which had extensive visual freedom more technical wizardry than you can shake a stick at. No more so than in the musical, comedy Love Me Tonight, the first film in history to use a zoom lens as it does several times throughout the movie (yet it would be decades until this technique would catch on). Not to mention the film’s early use of slow-motion during a very dreamlike deer hunt sequence – quite unlike anything else you’ll see in a film from the time.
Love Me Tonight opens with the city of Paris coming to life in a visual manner reminiscent of the silent documentary film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City; however this is accompanied by a symphony created by everyday sounds from a construction worker hitting the ground with a pike axe to a woman sweeping a pathway. Likewise, the Paris street sets look authentic (with shots reminiscent of Gene Kelly’s apartment and neighbourhood from An American In Paris), I would believe it was real-world location but it was a set in the Paramount back lot, which is equalled by the opulence and detail of the chateau seen later on in the film.
Love Me Tonight is an Ernst Lubitsch style romantic comedy focusing on European aristocracy. Our protagonist and his Supreme Frenchness is Maurice Chevalier in the role of well…Maurice – the stereotypical Frenchman who’s life revolves around the concept of romance (is there any truth to Hollywood’s fantasy of France and Paris in particular?). He is one fine dressed man in his dashing turtle neck and a distinct walk (he is a tailor after all) along with a shade of Groucho Marx aspect to his personality with his witty comebacks to all the bourgeois snobs he encounters.
It was a novelty in 1932 for musical numbers to be so interwoven into the text and pushing the plot along, in particular, the Isn’t It Romantic number which cleverly connects future lovers by song as Maurice begins singing it in his Paris tailor shop and it ends up being carried out of the city and across the countryside to a chateau in which Jeanette MacDonald (who feels like she was tailor-made to play nobility) and her magnificent pair of pipes finish it off. Love Me Tonight has no shortage of character actors galore such as the inclusion of the three spinster sisters (a more benevolent version of the three witched from Macbeth) being a very humorous touch, especially when they sound like chickens as they frantically pace. Also take note of MacDonald’s reaction to Charles Butterworth falling off ladder and landing on his flute – priceless.
The other great addition to Love Me Tonight is an always show-stealing Myrna Loy in a part which helped turn her career around from being typecast as the exotic temptress to performing high comedy as the sex-hungry Countess Valentine. The bored sex fiend spends her time around the chateau sleeping on chairs and furniture, becoming excited when the prospect of a male encounter arises. She gets many of the film’s best and not to subtle innuendo-laden lines and even sings for the only time in her career during her few lines in The Son Of A Gun Is Nothing But A Tailor. Currently, the only version of Love Me Tonight known to exist is the censored 1949 re-issue which includes among other potentially suggestive cuts, an omission of Myrna Loy’s reprise of “Mimi” due to her wearing of a suggestive nightgown. Why yes I’m outraged that a piece of film history has been erased and in no way does being deprived of seeing a scantily clad Myrna Loy factor into it.
Regardless of what we are left with, it surprises me the Love Me Tonight would even receive a post-code rerelease with every other line of dialogue being a sexual innuendo (not to mention one particularly luring pan of MacDonald in lingerie as the Doctor inspects her). We can always hope one day an uncensored print we surface.
Sat In Your Lap 