Screen Savers Movies » Love Me Tonight

Lady for a Day (1933)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:01:05 +0000

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 of feel-good schmaltz and well-tossed wisecracks. It’s unquestionably the best film ever made from a Runyon piece. Call it Capra-corn if you like, but it was made long before the uplift in the director’s movies became mechanically obvious and more than a little smug (as in his State of the Union of 1948). Lady for a Day’s plot is a reworking of Pygmalion, that is if Eliza were a decrepit geriatric and a drunk. It’s a “makeover” movie, made long before that concept became a cultural staple.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved

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Love Me Tonight (1932)

Jennifer Kurdyla, Editor — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:01:11 +0000

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 most essential part of this film–the sound–was able to reach audiences with clarity, novelty, and its own impressive cinematic prowess.

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Love Me Tonight (1932): Hollywood’s First Musical Masterwork

John DiLeo — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:35:38 +0000

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 taken on faith. Though incalculably important to the genre’s growth, and technologically state-of-the-art, they (and all other 1929-32 movie musicals) can only be recommended to those with forgiving natures toward the static, antiquated aspects of early musicals. Love Me Tonight, though indisputably silly, has much more going for it: it’s a film whose innovations still look innovative. Though it stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald (the genre’s reigning king and queen), and boasts an original score by Broadway’s Rodgers and Hart, its chief asset is the ceaselessly inventive direction of Rouben Mamoulian, one of Hollywood’s rising talents during the shaky transition to sound. In his first two films, the burlesque drama Applause (1929) and the gangster picture City Streets (1931), Mamoulian proved to be one of the first directors to treat the addition of sound as a creative, stylistic component of moviemaking, rather than a necessary evil. This made him a natural for musicals….