Love Me Tonight begins with a marvelous bit of found syncopation, a musical sequence introducing us to morning in Paris through the rhythmic sweepings, nailings, workings, and ambient noises of a city coming alive. It’s absolutely wonderful, and got me excited for the hour and a half to come.
Then, Maurice Chevalier shows up.
I’ve never been a big Chevalier hater. In fact, checking his IMDB credits reveals that I hadn’t seen any of his film before now. But I’ve gotta tell you that, after Love Me Tonight, I don’t understand why this guy was a movie star. Sure, I can see why he would have been huge in vaudeville: he could sing, he could dance, and his exaggerated French accent would’ve wowed ‘em in music halls across the American hinterland. On film, however, he exaggerated too much – he too clearly mugged, rather than acted, and he pulled me out of Love Me Tonight again and again and again.
So Chevalier’s a poor but honest tailor (fun side note, if you’re me: Ellermann is a rough German analogue to Tailor, so I was on the guy’s side even if the actor playing him bugged me) who finds himself posing as a count or duke or some such at a chateau in what’s supposed to be the Parisian countryside, but looks an awful lot like Pomona. The most decadent, decayed fringes of the French aristocracy live in this chateau, people so dissolute and lacking in vitality that I wanted to guillotine the lot of them.
Among these fossilized aristocrats live two women, Jeanette MacDonald (a princess) and Myrna Loy (a mere countess). MacDonald’s the love interest and Loy’s the Baxter, and so we discover Love Me Tonight’s second biggest flaw (after the casting of Chevalier): Myrna Loy blows everyone else in the film off the screen. She plays a bad girl of such spirit, such raw vitality, that she clearly belongs in a whole different movie. [Come to think of it, I’m reminded of Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise: the movie’s grooving along ok when suddenly this no-kidding Movie Star whom nobody’s ever seen before shows up and steals it out from under everybody, and the audience is left wondering who that kid was.] So you see, she’s the worst kind of Baxter – she makes the audience think the protagonist is an idiot for not immediately zeroing in on her, as opposed to the weak sauce who’s supposed to capture our hearts.
Will the tailor capture the heart of the princess for no apparent reason? Sure. Will we see one jaw-droppingly cool stunt involving a train? Absolutely. Will the songs go home with us? No. The dancing (This is a musical, after all.)? What dancing? I didn’t see a legitimate dance number in the whole picture.
What I saw, sadly, was an hour and a half of a bad film actor pursuing a woman the story gave me no reason to care about, while a no-kidding hot number for the ages waited in the wings.
So pass on Love Me Tonight. But fear not: I’m a loving kind of guy, and I’m not going to leave you hanging. Here’s Nat King Cole singing a song I thought would turn up in the movie, but didn’t:
And here’s Myrna Loy being ridiculously awesome:
You’re welcome, and good night.
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