Film historians credit Rouben Mamoulian's 1932 musical Love me Tonight with revolutionizing the movie musical. Of course, musicals were a form inapposite to silent pictures and, so, Mamoulian's innovative picture invents the genre. As a stylized type of theater, the musical had to be opened-up as it were, expanded beyond the proscenium arch, in its adaptation to cinema. Indeed, musicals often make this process thematic: Singin' in the Rain, for instance, is all about innovations transcending the boundaries of an art form -- early sound film's limitations are overcome by dubbing and the climactic dance and ballet sequence, "The Broadway Melody" begins in a theater and, then, expands into a cinematic universe completely incommensurate with the spatial restrictions of the four walls of a playhouse. The Band Wagon similarly uses a ballet number, "The Girl Hunt" to smash through theatrical space and develop motion expanding through variously incongruously vast and varied locations. (Of course, the ballet invoking different Impressionist painters in An American in Paris takes the same form.) All of this seem to have been invented in Mamoulian's picture, a film that shatters the concept of the stage-bound musical. From the first sequence, a "city symphony" at dawn in Paris in which various naturally occurring sounds, emanating from disparate locations, combine into a rhythmic pulse (pounding, sweeping, beating carpets, sawing wood and snoring all conceived as percussion) that, then, accompanies rhymed patter and, later, song lyrics, Love me Tonight bursts out of theatrical strictures and, even, when indoors invokes a sort of boundless and fantastic spectacle. The film is dated, of course -- it will be a hundred years old soon -- and the acting is highly stylized and, often, somewhat grotesque. Jeanette MacDonald, the leading lady, doesn't sing so much as warble and her operetta-like arias are alien to modern taste (and, probably, would have seemed archaic to most viewers by the mid-thirties), but the picture is wildly inventive and worth seeing. In my view, the films most similar to Love me Tonight from its era are the malicious and surreal cartoons by early Disney and the Fleischer brothers -- those animated features have the same bouncy elan and unexpected imagery with which Mamoulian invests this film.
The film's plot is so slender as to be non-existent. A jaunty Parisian tailor, a sort of Boulevardier, played by Maurice Chevalier (and called "Maurice" in the picture) leaves Paris to collect a debt owed to him by a French nobleman. The nobleman lives with his pompous uncle, a prince, in a comically enormous castle -- it has a stairway that seems to lead literally to heaven and characters dash up and down the endless steps as a repeated motif in the film. A melancholy, sexually frustrated princess lives in the castle. (Jeanette MacDonald as "Jeanette"). Maurice pretends to be a Baron so as not to embarrass the penniless nobleman who has fled to the castle to avoid paying his debts. (Maurice is owed 64,000 francs for dozens of suits that he has made for the caddish nobleman; and his subcontractors, a shirt-maker, bootmaker, and milliner are owed equally huge sums.) On the way to the castle, Maurice's car breaks down and he encounters the princess Jeanette riding like a Greek goddess in a sort of chariot. It's love at first sight, although Jeanette initially rebuffs Maurice's overtures. At the castle, the nobility orchestrate a stag hunt, complete with a hundred dogs, a whole herd of horses, and an equestrian band with elaborate hunting horns. Maurice, of course, knows nothing about horsemanship. But he boldly rides a fierce bucking bronco assigned to him (presumably for humiliation) called "Solitude". Solitude is so-named because he "always returns from the hunt alone" -- that is, having rid himself of his inconvenient rider. Maurice somehow subdues Solitude sufficiently to chase the stage into a hunting lodge. The stag is a beast right out of a Fleischer cartoon; the petite animals with huge eyes hops like a bunny and dances like a chorine. Jeanette and Maurice are alone in hunting lodge and the tailor kisses the princess. She resists at first but, then, succumbs to the tailor's charms and they seem to spend the night together -- the film is a pre-code picture in which all the dialogue is double entendre of the most bawdy kind. However, the movie shows the couple chastely snoozing in separate beds as they sing a love duet on the soundtrack (the titular "Love me Tonight".) In the morning, it's revealed that the supposed baron is merely a tailor and he is booted out of the household -- even the butlers and serving women are filmed from below so as to seem to tower over the poor tradesman. Maurice departs in disgrace, leaving the castle and its village on a steam locomotive. Jeanette, however, is still in love with him and she hops on her steed and races the train in a sequence of staple to a hundred silent movies. (Mamoulian stages the sequence with big dreamy close-ups superimposed over racing wheels and steam gushing out of the train's smoke-stack -- it's a very strange and irrational sequence with surrealist overtones.) Jeanette gets in front of the train, installs herself in the middle of the tracks in defiance of the engine hurtling toward her and the locomotive stops so that the happy couple, united again can embrace in foamy white clouds of steam. The movie has a number of inventive sequences: at the start, the penniless nobleman and con man, fleeing an aggrieved husband, has to join a footrace of skinny-clad runners; he's wearing his "BVDs", a word used often in the movie's lyrics for its rhyming potential. (BVD refers to a then-popular brand of men's underwear.) The nobleman hides out in Maurice's tailor shop where the hero provides him with a stylish suit so that he can escape the wrath of his lover's husband. Three dowagers in the castle form a clucking, gobbling chorus commenting on the action -- they are filmed alternatively as the witches in Macbeth (intoning imprecations and casting vast scary shadows) or as grotesque cackling hens. The movie features women who seem to be almost naked -- they wear slinky lingerie that leaves nothing to the imagination. There are two scenes involving men undressing Jeanette MacDonald -- in the first, the actress is stripped by a doctor who diagnoses her fainting fits as sexual hysteria (she was married at 16 to a 72 year old nobleman who has died and has been a widow for three years at age 22 when she and Maurice begin their love affair; the movie assumes that she needs sexual intercourse to be cured from her episodes of syncope.) Myrna Loy, as a sexually voracious cousin, slouches about half-dressed as well. At the film's climax, the tailor, still impersonating a Baron, comments on Jeanette's ill-fitting equestrienne garments, peels them off of her, and, then, lasciviously measures her bust and hips -- this episode results in the assembled nobility figuring out that he is a tailor and not a peer of the realm.
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the clever songs and the film's rhyming patter. The picture was written for the screen adapting a French play called "The Tailor at the Castle." Even by pre-code standards, the movie was pretty raunchy and the studio cut eight minutes, mostly Myrna Loy's part, as too risque and featuring too much near nudity. The movie is accounted a masterpiece, but it's performance style and operatic singing makes it a hard-sell for modern audiences -- it's a film that you have to be educated to enjoy. I'm not sure if my tepid response to the picture is based on the fact that I watched the movie on You-Tube (where you can see it for free) in a perfectly legible, but a little bit blurry format. Characteristic of the era, the movie has only a few close-ups but when they are deployed it is to maximum effect. Mostly, the figures on screen seem slightly too distant from the camera but this is because the movie has been carefully designed to be seen in a movie theater, that is, as godlike figures towering over the audience on the "silver screen." It's interesting that Jeanette MacDonald had a heart condition that caused her to frequently faint.
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