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The DVD revolution continues to
give us vintage gems gloriously restored with pristine picture and sound — last
year alone saw the release of THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938), THE DEVIL
AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941), TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE (1948) and the first batch
of Chaplin features, to name a few. The new Kino Video release of Rouben
Mamoulian's LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932) is a recent cause for celebration. Widely
acknowledged to be, along with SINGIN IN THE RAIN (1952), the best musical ever
created directly for the screen, LOVE ME TONIGHT is also a seminal film in the
development of the early talking picture.
Director Rouben Mamoulian
(1898-1987) is remembered today as one of the great innovators of the cinema.
His first features — APPLAUSE (1929), CITY STREETS (1931), DR. JEKYLL AND MR.
HYDE (1932) — are years ahead of their time in technique; after LOVE ME TONIGHT
he would go on to direct the Garbo vehicle QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) and the first
three-strip Technicolor feature, BECKY SHARP (1935), as well as such enduring
entertainments as THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940), BLOOD AND SAND (1941) and the
original Broadway production of OKLAHOMA! (1943) and CAROUSEL (1945).
LOVE ME TONIGHT is blessed with a
perfect cast. Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald demonstrate why they
were the screens's top musical stars of the early Thirties. They're ably
supported by the masterful comedic actors Charlie Ruggles and Charles
Butterworth, the scion of Hollywood's British community C. Aubrey Smith, and
most memorably, a young Myrna Loy as a blatant nymphomaniac.
The plot is simple: Chevalier is a
Parisian tailor who poses as a baron, and becomes romantically embroiled with
countess MacDonald before being exposed. What makes the film special is
Mamoulian's vibrant technique and the songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,
including "Isn't It Romantic?," "Lover," "Mimi," the title tune, and the
hilarious finale "The Son of A Gun is Nothing But a Tailor."
When I was a film student at
Boston's Emerson College in 1978, I had the great privilege to interview Rouben
Mamoulian. Here's what he had to say about his musical masterpiece:
"In LOVE ME TONIGHT, everything is
not only integrated, but highly stylized. It creates a world of its own; it's
kind of a fairy tale. I always have this bee in my bonnet that in America there
should be a form of the theater and film that would not have a European origin,
a form that would combine rhyming dialogue with action, song, and choreography
in a very harmonious way in one whole. You can lift the level of reality in
film so that every action is rhythmically combined with the dialogue, and that
is the essence of this film.
In order to establish this kind of
a world where everything is in order and flows musically, I had to start with
an utterly stylized beginning. I opened the whole street with rhythmic noises
to get used to the fact that this is a different world. It's a rhythmic world,
so after a few minutes you accept this as completely natural.
Maurice Chevalier, for the first
time, plays a very serious love scene. It's all with tongue in cheek, but I
think the love scene he plays here is extraordinarily moving. He never thought
he could do that. George Arliss was the great actor in Hollywood in those days,
and I remember after Chevalier saw the rushes he went to Mr. B.P. Schulberg
(Paramount's production chief) and said, "I saw that scene. I'm just like
George Arliss, only George Arliss can't sing!"
For Jeanette MacDonald it was a
part that had to be, as the English put it, "sent up" or "put on."
At a cocktail party just before I
started shooting the film, I met this young girl who came in with a freckled
face and an upturned hose, wearing tennis shoes. She was introduced as Myrna
Loy.
I said, "You can't be the Myrna Loy
that plays villainesses and Oriental spies in those B- pictures!"
She said, "That's me."
I said, "But you're the exact
opposite."
She says, "I can't get out of it.
I'm typecast. Nobody will give me a straight part." I said, "Would you like
one?"
She said, "I'd give my right arm to
do it."
So I told her to come see me the
next day at Paramount and she came over and I gave her the part. I built it up
a little, and you see her in the picture and she's really smashing.
There
is one zoom in LOVE ME TONIGHT. In those days it was all dolly shots. One day I
was shooting in the street and this guy from the laboratory came over holding a
lens in his hand: "You know, Mr. Mamoulian, we've got a new kind of lens here."
I said, "What is it?"
He said, "You can come right from a
long shot without a dolly. Do you want to try it?"
I said, "Sure let me try it. But
I'm not going to try it on a lead like Chevalier or MacDonald and ruin it and
have to do a retake."
I tried it on one of the extras,
the fat woman in the window. The first time the zoom lens was ever used.
Curiously enough, it was never used for years after that until suddenly it
became overly fashionable and today it bores the hell out of me. In every
picture you know you're going to have a long shot and a zoom right in. It's
monotonous. There is nothing worse than to see exactly what you expect to see.
In this country LOVE TONIGHT just
went by as a good musical, but in Europe it made a sensation. In Germany it was
called CASTLE OF THE MOON. They were writing essays on it. In Paris some of
these serious writers were writing about the rhythmic quality, it was a real
breakthrough. But in America it took several years. The longer time went by,
the higher LOVE ME TONIGHT grew and suddenly became a classic. The highest form
of praise is always from your fellow directors, and some of them have put it in
writing it is the picture they admire most."
LOVE ME TONIGHT still holds up
beautifully after seven decades. If you haven't seen it, you're in for a treat;
if you have, you'll revel in Kino's gorgeous new digital transfer. The disc
includes screenplay excerpts of deleted scenes, production and censorship
records, production stills, and an audio commentary by musical expert Miles Kreuger.
In
our interview, Mamoulian had some very strong and often harsh thoughts about
the state of contemporary cinema. Remember, this was 1978, but his aesthetic
manifesto could apply just as well today:
MAMOULIAN:
"I think we've gone away from a general architecture of the film. The way films
are shot and cut today is like working with an axe. There's no design, no
fluency, no rhythm. I think the use of the camera is pathetic, just being
juggled one way or the other. I'm talking about the general run of product,
mind you. There are obviously exceptions, Kubrick, Coppola, Friedkin, Lucas, to
name a few.
On
the stage there is only one kind of movement and one point of view. The one
kind of movement is actors on the stage. The only point of view is the ticket
you bought. You sit in one seat and see the whole thing from that angle. It's
all a long shot. On the screen I believe you have three kinds of movement. The
movement of the actors on the screen, the movement of the camera, and the
movement of the montage, the editing, how each shot follows the other, what is
the length of each shot. Those three have to be harmonized into one integrated
whole. Now, when you do that, you've got a powerful thing.
But
it's not being done now. There's no such thing as a montage. You don't ever see
a dissolve. It's all cut-cut-cut, like hitting you with a club. The dissolve is
one of the most potent tools to increase the impact of a preceding scene and
start the next one dynamically. The right dissolve tops the scene that ends. In
APPLAUSE (1929), for example, Helen Morgan is dying in her chair and it time
dissolves into a brass band guy hitting the cymbal. It hits you right in the
head, it makes her scene end strongly and starts the new scene anew. Each
dissolve has a tremendous dramatic value. Today it's not done at all.
The
camera is the most eloquent tool in your possession, but it has to make sense.
This constant zooming is dull, it's really boring. I don't mean to sound too
skeptical, but I think basically it seems that the filmmakers, including a
great number of the actors, have stopped loving the medium. There seems to be
no love, no passion. You hear so many actors interviewed saying I'm doing this
because I'm getting a check on Thursday, but I'd rather be in politics or I'd
rather direct. Where is the joy of acting? How can you act unless you enjoy it?
That's what always was true of actors. Today it's rare to find an actress who
says I love it, and I get paid for doing what I love. It seems that the joy of
making a film is gone. It seems to be inclined to the mechanics of sex, to the
obvious, which is dull. To me what's interesting — and you'll notice that I've
practiced it in all my films — is what precedes the sex and what follows it,
but not the sex in itself, because it's obvious. The bedroom scene with Garbo
in QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) is certainly more erotic the way it is than the way
it would be done today. They would have two naked people making love to each
other, and that's putting it euphemistically because that's not making love,
it's just gyrating sexually!
We
have to come back to realize that art is a magic wand that touches stone and
turns it into gold, metaphorically speaking. It turns everything into gold.
Today we touch everything and it turns to lead, it's ugly. We portray man
wallowing in a gutter, full of foibles and sicknesses, falling short. They say
life is like that, but it isn't true. Life is not like that, it's got black and
white. We still have great people, spiritual people. We have great aspirations
and ideals. You take Shakespeare. He always had balls. He knew there was such a
thing as conscience, such a thing as good. You've got to have both sides. I
don't care how debased or how sordid your subject is, you must portray the
whole truth of life, not partial, because partial truth is worse than a lie.
We
must not portray man as hopeless. Art must uplift, it must give you faith in
man, in his dignity. It must contribute to the goodness and beauty of his
world, and what greater medium to do that than motion pictures. It's a miracle
and we get so used to it, it's like having diamonds for pebbles. The only
modern art, it's a blink in the eye compared to thousands of years of painting
or architecture. No art in the past has ever succeeded in capturing movement,
and movement is life. There is no life without movement. Motion pictures
capture movement, life, it's a miracle, and it's a noble art. Why not use it to
deal with things that stir you, that elevates you, that leaves you with deep
emotions. No, they're really debasing it. You see all that trash in the
majority of so-called theatres, and certainly 95% of television, it's an
absolute cornucopia of garbage. It's a dreadful shame. I'm optimist enough to
believe that the solution will ultimately come from audiences. By the time
there are enough people staying away from this trash you'll get better films. I
believe in people. Finally they'll speak up and that will be the turnaround. I
don't think there is any other way but up from now on."
-- JOHN GALLAGHER
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