love me tonight

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October 3 movie: Love Me Tonight. Sweet, silly 1932 musical starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Robert Osbourne said that this was the first musical to integrate the musical numbers into the movie, instead of isolated set pieces. He also said that "Mimi" (sung in the movie) is Chevalier's signature song, but for me it will always be "You've Brought a New Kind of Love to Me," as sung by the Marx Brothers. ("If the nightingales could sing like you, they'd sing much sweeter than they do!") Myrna Loy has a supporting part as a man-crazy aristocrat.

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I first saw "Love Me Tonight" in a course on the history of movie musicals. I esp. love the opening Paris in the AM montage (clearly inspired by Gershwin's "American in Paris." The director, Rouben Mamoulian, does some amazing things with his camera. I read somewhere (IMDB, I think) that the ending with the train is an Eisenstein parody. And you gotta love all that racy pre-Code dialog.
Fave scene? Probably Chevalier's bit with the stag during the hunt.

That Marx Brothers sequence is my strongest association with Chevalier, too. Monkey Business is such a great film, completely unfettered by the hinderence of a plot.

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This page contains a single entry by Sarah published on October 8, 2004 9:51 PM.

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