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….

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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