The Measure of Love

LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932)
Starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
(94 minutes) B&W

“Isn’t it romantic?” the tailor (Maurice Chevalier) queries his customer, and continues in song:

My face is glowing, I'm energetic.
The art of sewing I found poetic.
My needle punctuates the rhythm of romance.
I don't give a stitch if I don't get rich.
A custom tailor who has no custom
is like a sailor, no one will trust 'em.
But there is magic in the music of my shears.
I shed no tears, lend me your ears.
Isn't it romantic? Soon I will have found some girl that I adore.

The customer picks up the catchy refrain, takes it with him past the taxi stand. There the song passes to a writer who takes the tune in a taxi to the train station, where it plays into the minds of some lovelorn troopers. They then march in step across the countryside to the tune now locked to the beat of their hearts. Their joyous noise gets picked up by a gypsy boy who takes it to camp in the strings of his violin, which plays its way to the uppermost tower window of a nearby castle, where the princess throws open her window and completes the song into the night, wondering when her prince will come. So the simple tailor is connected to the world and then to the true love of the princess (Jeanette MacDonald) by a song.

Isn’t it romantic?

Yes, it is, and much more modern than a 1930s musical has a right to be, but Mamoulian’s then-revolutionary camera work and the fact that he worked out the songs in pre-production with Rodgers and Hart to move along with the camera and the story keeps things flowing along at a surprisingly still-fresh pace.

I cannot take much of MacDonald’s high-blown but lovely operatic singing, but will admit it works well when paired with Chevalier’s down-to-earth singsong patter. In fact it makes them, to me, a much better and more interesting couple than what we see and hear when she duets in other films with the similarly operatic Nelson Eddy. When she sings with Eddy, her own “kind,” life feels narrow and as expected, but when she "lowers" herself to sing with a more pop like “dittier” like Chevalier the world becomes larger with more possibilities.

The scene described in my opening here better demonstrates this feeling: though the song itself is changed and sometimes mangled on its road from the tailor to the princess its message remains true. Moreover, other songs in “Love Me Tonight” like “Mimi” in similar meme-like fashion move from those resting comfortably in their boudoirs to those getting their hands dirty in the kitchen. Those on high, those below, and everyone in-between have an important commonality – “important” because concentrating on the common binding thread makes the future a day well worth the living. Isn’t that romantic, too?