Love Me Tonight
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian | Music & Lyrics by Rodgers and Hart
USA ⎮ 1932⎮ Fiction ⎮ 104 min
Host Venue: Main Street Landing
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?
Festival Passes are available HERE. It is highly recommended to purchase a Pass although individual tickets are also available. If you purchase a Pass you need not book individual screenings – just bring your pass to the door. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
Passes :
General Admission – $40
VTIFF Patron Members – $32
Students – $20
VTIFF All Access Members – FREE.
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.)
“Love Me Tonight opens early one morning in Paris. A few workers step out into the street and begin pounding away at the concrete. This is the foundational beat. Eventually shopkeepers emerge to sweep away dust from the sidewalk, supplying a counterpoint to the construction worker’s pulse. Housewives open their windows to shake out rugs, adding to the rising symphony of musique concrete. By the time Chevalier looks out his window to exclaim “this city is too noisy for me,” Mamoulian’s daring orchestration of “The Song of Paree” has taken the world of sound films light years beyond what was largely considered acceptable in the “talk into the plant” era of early talkies. (It has also predicted the funky fresh street rhythms of Stomp by roughly 65 years.) And it is only the first sublime moment in a film that tiptoes lighter-than-air for its entire running time” ~ Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine