Love Me Tonight

A perfect souffl( of a musical--light, inconsequential, and utterly delicious--Love Me Tonight stars Maurice Chevalier as a Parisian tailor who's mistaken for a rich nobleman when he visits a chateau to collect a debt and takes the opportunity to romance a princess (Jeanette MacDonald). The supporting cast includes such comic stalwarts as Charlie Ruggles, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith, and Charles Butterworth, and there's a delightful score by Rodgers and Hart, which includes such classics as “Lover” and “Mimi.” But the person who ties everything together into a beautifully-wrapped package is director Rouben Mamoulian; the film might date from 1932, but the staging is endlessly fluent and inventive, never more so than in the extended “Isn't It Romantic?” number, where the song is passed from person to person until it's become virtually a national obsession. Love Me Tonight is completely illogical, a send-up of operetta conventions rife with nonsense verse, absurd situations, and crazy caricatures, but it's also one of the most sheerly enjoyable musicals of all time. This Kino DVD release includes not only a lustrous transfer but a wealth of extra material: an audio commentary by Miles Kreuger, short films of Chevalier singing “Louise” and MacDonald singing “Love Me Tonight,” a photo and poster gallery, and printed texts of deleted scenes and production documents (including correspondence concerning censorship questions). Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. [Note: also newly available from Kino at the same price is Mamoulian's 1929 debut feature Applause.] (F. Swietek)