The reputation of Love Me Tonight at the moment could not be higher. Most film scholars consider it one of the great – if not the greatest – cinematic film comedies. That’s justifiable. The project was originated by Lubitsch, but he ceded control over it to Rouben Mamoulian when he became more interested in making One Hour With You. Some critics have said that it’s a better Lubitsch film than any Lubitsch himself made. But that’s silly. The critic Tom Maine noted that Lubitsch is a miniaturist, everything in his movies is compressed and contained, while Mamoulian is a spectacularist, an artist of big gestures. Despite its Parisian boulevard comedy origins, Love Me Tonight covers huge spaces, physically and socially. For me it’s one of the most cinematic comedies I’ve ever seen.
The stars, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, made four films with the Lubitsch crew if you count Love Me Tonight (the others are The Love Parade, One Hour With You, and The Merry Widow). It’s an inherently funny pairing – the cartoonish, rakish chansonnier boy-man from Paree and the gossamer thin, ethereally aristocratic blonde diva; one with a flaneur dandy’s signature boater hat, the other with a voice that could bring the Parisian opera house to ecstasy. Their chemistry is almost inexplicable. Chevalier (who was one of my hussar colonel grandfather’s favorite actors – he even affected the boater, which I still own; for what it’s worth, his other favorite male star was Adolphe Menjou, whom he uncannily resembled late in life) was comfortable being typecast as a cheerful, careless, good natured, urbane ladies man of the people, while MacDonald was, in the Lubitsch films, the princess imprisoned in one or another aristocratic gilded cage. MacDonald became one of the greatest international film stars of the Thirties in her operetta films with Nelson Eddy. She was a superb actress – but in the Chevalier films she’s just a brilliant comedienne.
Love Me Tonight takes on fantastic proportions. It’s a far more socially realistic film, for all its fantasy, than most of Lubitsch’s. Chevalier plays Maurice, a modest Parisian tailor who nonetheless dresses with aristocratic style while on the job. Maurice pursues a deadbeat client, the Vicomte Gilbert de Vareze (Charles Ruggles), who won’t pay what he owes to any of the craftspeople of working-class Paris, to the palace of the Vicomte’s magnate uncle, the Duc d’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith). On his way there he cute-meets the Princess Jeanette, who mistakes Maurice for an aristocrat and falls for him. Complications ensue.
The story is really good – underneath the daffy romantic comedy of mistaken identities in a magical chateau it’s about the ruling class not paying for what it takes from the people working for them and bolstering up impostors.
The famous opening shots are of an early morning Paris street. It’s a real Paris street. As it comes to life, it’s replaced by a realistic studio set; more and more characters enter the scene, just like on a big stage, but the camera is very mobile. The people are all working class – shopkeepers, grocers, shoemakers, housewives. They are actually working (something you’d rarely see in Lubitsch), but they are also making rough music, beating the rugs in time, creating rhythm with their hammers. It’s still basically rough stuff until the camera moves up to Maurice’s garret apartment, when it turns into a jaunty, witty Rogers and Hart song (Paree “has taxicabs and claxons/ to scare the Anglo-Saxons”).
As soon as he’s dressed, he’s down in the street greeting all the petite bourgeoisie and working class (“good morning Monsieur Cohen, how’s it goin’?”). At the end of his jaunt, he changes into the clothes of an elegant tailor – the kind of disguise that will allow him to pass as an aristocrat later. In this world, he’s concerned with money, debts, getting paid, and getting his friends paid. At this point, it’s not at all Lubitschean and it’s not clear how it’s going to get into a romantic magical world. (Note that the lower class tailor is dressed like a diplomat when the aristocratic Vicomte arrives in his “BVDs,” and that the near-naked and penniless Vicomte is considered the “best dressed man” in Paris because of the clothes that the tailor makes for him, which he doesn’t pay for.)
Then comes one of the most famous sequences in film history: the career of the song “Isn’t it Romantic?” When Maurice starts, it’s not really romantic at all – very petty bourgeois in its modest irony. The song then gradually gets free of the singer. It passes from person to person as if it had a purpose of its own. In his little book on Laughter, the philosopher Henri Bergson writes that the comic often imitates children’s games and toys, like the jack-in-the-box, marionettes, hide and seek, etc. One game he didn’t mention is tag – and that’s what this song is doing. From the Vicomte in the tailor shop, to a cab driver, to a composer, to an army platoon, to a gypsy camp, and ultimately to Princess Jeanette. By the time it reaches her, it is full of hazy, dreamy romantic longing, sung by a gauzy princess on the balcony of an absurdly gigantic castle, fantasizing about her prince charming. The cinematic play with space and flow is amazing.
The trance is comically dispelled when Princess Jeanette’s ridiculous long-time suitor, the Comte de Savignac (Charles Butterworth), arrives at her balcony with a ladder and tiny flute. The anti-Maurice, he can’t keep his balance and he lands ass first on his little flute, which he may never play again.
When Maurice finally arrives at the palace (having already literally run into the Princess on his way there, without either character knowing who the other is), he’s engulfed by the monumental building (an amazing movie set to behold), by the Vicomte’s ploy to pass him off as a mysterious Baron, and by the expectations of the pixillated household, who believe Maurice is the perfect noble match for the lonely princess.
Princess Jeanette falls for him, saying she would love him whoever he truly is – all the while sure he is the scion of a noble and rich family.
The truth finally comes out when the little tailor offers to make a stylish riding habit for her. As Maurice sets about measuring Jeanette for the fitting, she becomes increasingly puzzled, and then alarmed, at his professional purposefulness and his lack of erotic play as he encircles her body. Reality is starting to get to her, drop by little drop. The tailor is treating her deshabille much too “objectively.”
When the truth comes out, what is to be done? How can the Princess in Dreamland actually give up her fantasy world to live with a brave little tailor in Paris? The plot – and Mamoulian – solve this in a way that transposes a fantasy in a movie into a meta-fantasy about the movies. She rides off after the train he’s taking to Paris in a speeded-up gallop, just like in the Westerns – albeit with the usual roles reversed. Here the Princess is the heroic horseperson catching up with the locomotive. The only resolution to the conflict between dream-comedy and working class comedy is movie comedy.
Love Me Tonight makes everything it takes to make a film into a monumental spectacle of magical comedy. They don’t make many films like this.