TheLittleSongbird That is not to knock The Love Parade, One Hour With You and The Merry Widow(Merry Widow is an extremely close second) because they are all excellent too. But while it may lack the Lubitsch touch or be as ground-breaking as The Love Parade(though Love Me Tonight is still influential when it comes to musicals), Love Me Tonight just struck me as being tinsy bit better, the quality between the four films though is very close though. It is elegantly shot with some very clever camera work in Sonofagun is Nothing But a Tailor and with an Expressionistic touch in places and has very sumptuous set and costume design. Rodgers and Hart's score and songs are just sublime, some of their best work, Isn't It Romantic? is irresistibly beautiful and inventively choreographed. The script is often hilarious and filled with sophisticated charm and witty rhymes with some of the dialogue refreshingly ahead of its time, particularly noteworthy is Myrna Loy's pre-censorship response to "could you go for a doctor?". The story is immensely charming, warm-hearted and never with a dull moment, doing very cleverly to avoid becoming stage-bound or contrived with a story that in different hands could easily have been. The choreography is done with much poise and invention and while no Lubitsch(one of the primary reasons why The Love Parade really broke ground, and he had a style of his own) the direction still has great technical skill and plenty of class with some clever touches. Maurice Chevalier has great comic timing, is very natural on screen and has unsurpassed joie-de-vivre and Jeanette MacDonald proves to be a perfect partner for him in a beguilingly acted and sung performance. The supporting roles are very well-taken, special mention going to the uproarious turn of Myrna Loy, and no it's not just for that pre-censorship response or her delivery of it. Overall, really wonderful and the best of the already incredibly high-standard Chevalier and MacDonald outings. 10/10 Bethany Cox

richard-1787 If you know the two previous M. Chevalier/J. MacDonald collaborations, Love Parade and One Hour with You, both directed by E. Lubitch, I suspect you will find this movie a major disappointment, as I did. There are a few good lines, but basically the script is very dull. There are two good songs, Isn't it Romantic (which is a very good song, developed over a series of scenes in a way movies no longer do that is really very striking) and Mimie. The rest of the songs are very forgettable - which is strange, given that they were written by Rodgers and Hart, who wrote some of our best musicals. MadDonald does some decent acting; Chevalier is pure corn for most of the movie. The small comedy parts are fine but not outstanding.In short, a largely forgettable movie, save for "Isn't it Romantic," and the opening of the movie, which does a nice job of evoking the sounds of Paris as the day starts.-------------------------I watched this movie again tonight, and I have to admit that I enjoyed it much more than I did five years ago when I wrote the above review. This is not a Lubitch comedy, so it is not filled with clever double-entendres, though there are a few. What I found interesting this time were the camera angles and the way some of the scenes were set up. They were really very innovative, often, as when Jeanette MacDonald's real horse is set up in parallel to an iron horse along side which she is riding. There are other scenes as well in which the camera work is really very innovative and impressive.I also found the movie funnier tonight than I gather I did five years ago. There are little touches, like the forever sewing three aunts meant to recall the three fates, that are really very clever.So I raised my vote for the movie to 7, and would say that yes, it is worth a watch.

st-shot Maurice Chevalier turns on the the Gallic charm offensive while Jeanette hits the high notes in this highly entertaining musical comedy featuring the music of Rodgers and Hart, Love Me Tonight. Under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian and the watchful eye of the Breen office the film is filled with comical innuendo and suggestion wryly pulled off by the director and screenwriter's play on words and the overpowering guileless personage of Chevalier.When Maurice (Chevalier) a tailor decides to collect on a debt owed him by a near do well aristocrat he crashes the family compound. He is persuaded by the deadbeat to impersonate one of their lineage in order to secure payment instead of getting them both tossed from the mansion. He is quickly besotted by Princess Jeanette who is less than thrilled with him at first but falls prey to his seductive ways before being jolted by the fact he is a commoner.While Chevalier and Mc Donald duet delightfully throughout in song and patter (especially in a scene where he fits her for a riding outfit ) Mamoulian does a fine job of skewering the upper crust leisure class at play with some comic choreography and a supporting cast displaying a variety of snobbery, entitlement and a touch of pixalation. A trio of timid aunts scurry about fretting in unison, the family patriarch played by C. Aubrey Smith bangs out a stanza of Mimi, even the hired help gets in on the condescension. As early sound musicals go Love Me Tonight remains one of the best with Chevalier at his peak and Mac Donald on the crest of hers. It has wit in addition to some wonderfully delivered tunes and in flashes, moments that foreshadow Rules of the Game seven years away. Above all though it is an excellent entertainment that nearly eighty years down the road still retains a fresh energy.

bkoganbing 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.