Lady for a Day is based on Damon Runyon’s short story Madame La Gimp. Capra and Runyon are an ideal match, with their knack for balancing sentiment with humor and in their affection for underdogs. Runyon’s surefire tale is prime fodder for Capra, and the meeting of material and director produces a disarming work full [...]

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Despite its predecessors, Love Me Tonight is one of the best first movie musicals. The inter-class love between Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald blossoms before audiences to the soundtrack of Rodgers and Hart’s original score, providing the perfect mix of familiar and fresh. And thanks to the expertise of director Rouben Mamoulian, the [...]

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Can anyone doubt that Love Me Tonight is the screen’s first great musical? The landmark films that preceded it, including the Oscar-winning backstage musical The Broadway Melody (1929), which was the first all talking-singing-dancing triple threat, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ruritanian romance The Love Parade (1929), now look like relics; their onetime freshness can only be [...]

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