Love Me Tonight
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian | Music & Lyrics by Rodgers and Hart
USA | 1932 | Fiction | 104 min
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?
Considered a landmark musical, Love Me Tonight opens by creating Paris as sound sculpture...in a style that was revolutionary for its time, combining both singing and film editing, as the song "Isn't It Romantic" is passed from one singer (or group of singers) to another, all of whom are at different locales. The film stars Maurice Chevalier as a tailor who poses as a nobleman and Jeanette MacDonald as a princess with whom he falls in love.
It was made pre-Code and is therefore more risqué than most films made after mid-1934. (Pre-Code refers to the brief, more relaxed era, in Hollywood between the widespread adoption of sound in pictures in 1929 and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines in mid-1934.)