I suppose it’s time to confess my heresy: My two favorite musical films are both in black and white, and date from the early 1930s. Worse yet, only one of them is American. (The other, which I’ll deal with somewhat later in this series, is French.) Yes, I know, I know. The phrase “musical film” means big-budget, Technicolor MGM spectaculars, wherever possible starring Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, or Fred Astaire. (A special niche in one upper corner of the definition has been reserved for Astaire’s earlier black-and-white pictures with Ginger Rogers and with Rita Hayworth.) Do not get me wrong: I like many of these movies, and often rewatch segments of them with great pleasure. They all have their good points. They just aren’t my idea of the perfect musical film.
For that, we have to go back to the early sound era, when inventive directors were experimenting with the new technology, when musicals were still “musical comedies” and bore no obligation to lecture on public morals (though a lot of them did anyway), and when the Production Code had not yet been reinforced by the schoolmarm-ish backlash to the success of Mae West’s early films. We call that era pre-Code, though the Production Code was already in effect; it was just far less strictly enforced than after the sway of Ms. West’s hips had sent all of America’s small-town Baptist preachers reeling.
And it happened during this fecund era, when an economically disastrous America desperately needed every scrap of innovative joy a musical film could provide, that the industry noticed the abilities of an Armenian émigré who had trained at the Kiev Opera, had escaped here while the newly Sovietized Russia was struggling to squash rebellion in the Ukraine, and had wangled a prime job as head of opera production for the new music school that George Eastman was starting in Rochester, N.Y. (Readers curious about this phase of the director’s work can dip into Paul Horgan’s amusing novel The Fault of Angels.)
This young man’s name was Rouben Mamoulian, and if you don’t recognize it, your musical theater education has some serious blank spots. But more of that later. For now, it is still the mid-1920s. Mamoulian’s opera work at Rochester has attracted some attention in New York, and the Theatre Guild, still a young, exciting organization then at the peak of its early success, decides to take a big risk on the newly Americanized young man from Tbilisi, Georgia. The South Carolina novelist DuBose Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, have made a stage version of Heyward’s best-selling novel Porgy, and the Guild, now a go-to organization on Broadway for risky serious ventures, needs a director. It will be a big-scale production with a large, and largely Black, cast. Many American-born directors—which at that moment in history mainly means white male directors—are cautious about the idea. Yes, there is a Black theater tradition, thriving in Harlem and in the Black communities of other big cities. Yes, without question there are gifted and dedicated artists within the Black community. But this is Broadway: Black theater, plagued by all the barriers that segregation and restricted educational opportunities can throw up against it, has notoriously ramshackle standards; the challenge will be a daunting one.
The Guild, and Mamoulian, were undaunted. The exactitude he had learned through his training in opera, where action must be fitted to the music, turned out to fit particularly well with his musically sensitive Black cast. Porgy, the play, is lauded. It runs, it tours, it comes back to Broadway. Songs are written in tribute to it.
One scene of Porgy especially captured audiences’ fancy: At the top of the play’s Act 3, Mamoulian invented a dialogue-free pantomime of Catfish Row waking up—people opening shops, starting their everyday household tasks, getting ready for and going off to work. Unaccompanied by any instrumental music, it was keyed to the rhythmic sounds of sweeping, rug-beating, chopping, tapping, and laundering, with the action of the play gradually evolving out of it. The scene vitally fulfilled the Heywards’ intention of showing Catfish Row as a thriving community, with people sharing and supporting one another’s concerns. George Gershwin in particular was enraptured with it. It led not only to his including this unscripted scene as a key element in the opera he was to make of the work eight years later, but to Mamoulian’s involvement as a central figure in the opera’s shaping when the Guild produced Porgy and Bess, with him directing, in 1935. (As an indication of how highly Mamoulian’s contribution to the work was valued, when the piano-vocal score of Porgy and Bess was first published, in a signed and numbered limited edition, it bore four signatures: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Rouben Mamoulian.)
Gershwin was not the only musical theater artist fascinated by Mamoulian’s exploration, in Porgy the play, of the musical and rhythmic possibilities of directing. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a young songwriting team who were coming to prominence—partly through a revue they had written for the Guild, The Garrick Gaieties—not long before Porgy opened in 1927, remembered it four years later, when they found themselves working with Mamoulian at Paramount on what would become Love Me Tonight, a film starring the already celebrated French singer-actor Maurice Chevalier.
In the interim, Mamoulian had become one of New York’s most sought-after directors, staging a string of shows, for the Theatre Guild and others, that included the world premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions, with Alfred Lunt as Marco Polo, and Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, starring the legendary Alla Nazimova. Rodgers and Hart had worked through a series of shows, ranging from mocking operettas and rickety star vehicles to formally experimental works (for one of which a program note had warned audiences that music would track in and out of the scenes so frequently as to make a list of musical numbers an impossibility).
Naturally, Hollywood beckoned. While still busy winding up this first phase of his theater career, Mamoulian had begun working on a film, shot largely at Paramount’s Astoria studios. Porgy and Marco Millions, both still touring, both played return engagements on Broadway during this time. As expected, he did not settle for the conventional: Applause (1929) still ranks as one of the most innovative of early sound films, a surprisingly large part of it shot on location in Manhattan; Mamoulian found ingenious ways of getting around the unwieldy sound-recording equipment that reduced so many early talkies to stasis. Applause tells a familiar backstage story, but it is an unusually harsh one, of a kind that would become rare in film until a renewed push for realism brought it back in the late 1960s: The star diva (Helen Morgan) of an old-fashioned burlesque show finds her daughter, whom she has tried to keep sheltered from the business, not only following the same wrong path she herself went down but taking the diva’s current beau along with her. The frankness, and the palpable pain in Morgan’s performance, are both still startling today; the overall effect is more like 1940s Italian neorealism than anything else that came out of Hollywood, even in the pre-Code era.
For still greater technical opportunities, Mamoulian relocated to Hollywood, where Paramount next assigned him to carry out the first sound remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). They had hoped to cast John Barrymore, whose 1920 silent version had been one of the sensations of its day, but Barrymore had migrated to MGM; the chosen replacement was Fredric March, who had, ironically, just played the role based on Barrymore in the film The Royal Family of Broadway (1930). Here Mamoulian showed his grasp of technical matters by working out, with makeup artist Wally Westmore and cinematographer Karl Struss, a system for making the transformation of good Dr. Jekyll into evil Mr. Hyde a brilliant visual coup. March’s makeup for the transformation scenes was applied in varicolored patches, not visible onscreen thanks to color filters that made them invisible, in black and white, until the filters were removed. Nine decades later, the effect is still unnerving.
By the time Mamoulian had arrived in Hollywood, Maurice Chevalier had established himself as one of the most popular figures on American movie screens. His iconic straw boater, his half-bashful half-seductive smile, and his Gallic accent (which rumor said was a carefully applied performance effect) had made him a heartthrob, a universally recognizable target of parodists, and a staple of the recording industry. Ernst Lubitsch, who had directed Chevalier in three successful films before Mamoulian took up the cause, had pushed Chevalier’s intimacy with his audience to the point of having the diffident boulevardier talk directly into the camera in One Hour With You (1932), a device, as far as I know, not repeated in an American film until Joseph Anthony employed it in his movie version of The Matchmaker in 1958. (Comedians, notably Groucho Marx in the parody of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude in Animal Crackers [1930], had already used the device for quick throwaway comments or for spoof purposes, but what Lubitsch and Chevalier did was different.)
Paramount’s optimal romantic pairing for Chevalier was Jeanette MacDonald, a recent recruit to film after a decade of playing second leads in hit Broadway musicals and occasionally getting a lead role in some that turned out to be flops. Their disparate musical styles, plus the onscreen image of virginal hauteur that MacDonald presented (she actually had a saucy showbiz gal’s sense of humor), gave the relationship a degree of dynamic tension: In the plots that Lubitsch and his screenwriters carpentered for them, the proud lady would be taken down a peg, while the rake with the roving eye would learn the virtues of fidelity and domestic bliss.
The arrangement had worked extremely well for Lubitsch on The Love Parade (1929), and marginally less well on Monte Carlo (1930), where he had to do without Chevalier, who had elected to take a break from filmmaking for a concert tour, leaving Lubitsch and MacDonald to cope with the much drier style of the English musical star Jack Buchanan. Then MacDonald had herself gone roving, to try what turned out to be a series of cinema mishaps at other studios, before reuniting with Paramount, Lubitsch, and Chevalier for One Hour With You. She was still very much the junior partner in this enterprise, billed below the title while Chevalier was billed above.
When Mamoulian stepped into this situation, trailing clouds of glory from his previous Paramount films, the material for the next Chevalier-MacDonald vehicle had already been chosen: a light comedy, cut to the standard Paris boulevard-theater pattern, by the team of Léopold Marchand and Paul Armont, in which a young tailor, coming to a country estate to collect an unpaid bill, is mistaken for a baron, and plays along with the misunderstanding because he has fallen in love with the haughty unmarried princess whose future is at the core of the chateau’s concerns. This class-leveling trifle, redolent of so many previous operetta plots, was to have a score by Rodgers and Hart, who responded with alacrity to Mamoulian’s ideas of how to link theater songwriting to cinematic mobility.
In his earlier forays with Chevalier and MacDonald, Lubitsch had toyed with rhyme and with rhythmically spoken dialogue, but Mamoulian, steeped in opera, went fearlessly further. Six long sequences, and several shorter ones, taking up roughly half the screen time of Love Me Tonight, are either entirely sung or spoken in rhythm (with rhymed dialogue by Hart). The method is used not only to keep the melodies running through the audience’s minds, but also to link the characters thematically, to build transitions from place to place, and to create a picture—a reality-based but charmingly stylized picture—of the story’s two contrasting worlds, the big-city small shopkeeper’s life and the grand but stuffy life of the aristocratic chateau.
The success Mamoulian and his brilliant songwriting team achieved with this is nothing short of a marvel. Although almost no one in it dances at any point, the whole film seems to be dancing as you watch, openmouthed. Though full of witty barbs and sharp bits of reality, Love Me Tonight seems lighter than air—a magical journey that nothing can bring down, a sophisticated fairy tale with an adult raised eyebrow for every hint of childhood sentiment. It has been compared to other films of its time, especially those of Lubitsch and René Clair, but nothing is quite like it, and virtually no other film can match the droll headlong sweep of its musical storytelling. (The sole exception that puts the “virtually” in the previous sentence is my other favorite film musical, René Clair’s Le Million [1931].)
The film starts with a Parisian version of Mamoulian’s famed community-wakes-up sequence from Porgy. A cathedral bell sounds the early hour, while smokestacks begin to puff. Train cars sit motionless; a lone bicyclist speeds down an empty boulevard. The thud of a road mender’s pickax sounds a downbeat, while nearby, a sleeping clochard snores on the upbeat. A woman sweeps her stoop, while another, at an upstairs window, beats a rug; a cobbler tap-taps on a shoe. Taxis and autos add their klaxon sound as the street fills with people heading for work, peddlers pulling their carts. As instrumental underscoring sneaks in—finally!—to this melee of man-made work music, the camera, which has never stopped moving, pans up to another upstairs window, where we see, hanging on the wall, Chevalier’s trademark straw boater. And then, at last, we see him, sleepily pulling on his work clothes, as he mutters a rhymed couplet about Paris in the morning being too loud for him—and pulls the window shut!
But now we are at the song, and Chevalier sings it: “That’s the Song of Paree,” a lyric full of what Americans expect to find in Paris (“men that sell you postcards/ much naughtier than most cards”) and sly Larry Hart puns (“You would sell your wife and daughter/ for just one Latin Quarter”). By now Chevalier is dressed in the clothes he wears to work, and the camera follows him down to the apartment building’s entrance and along the street as he greets neighbors and friends, in sung or half-sung couplets (“Hello, Mrs. Bendix!/ How’s your appendix?”). As the musical segment comes to a close, he reaches his tailor shop and disappears into its dressing room. The camera holds on the shop’s clock while minutes pass in fast motion, Chevalier emerges, now elegantly clad in a gentleman tailor’s attire, and a customer, Emile (Bert Roach), comes in to pick up his suit. For the first time, nearly 15 minutes into the film, we are hearing unrhymed spoken dialogue, with no musical underscoring. And yet we have already been immersed in the life of Maurice the tailor and his world. It’s sheer magic.
The dialogue, and the events that it brings on, are both funny and rich with exposition, but what’s about to come is an even more astonishing delight. Emile steps out of the dressing room, rhapsodizing in rhyme over his new suit, and Maurice responds in song, with his version of what will become one of the film’s biggest hits, “Isn’t It Romantic?” He sings, however, about the romance of needle and thread, and finding some nice obedient girl to marry. Emile, humming, takes up the tune as he starts to leave the shop, and then stops, singing to it, “I forgot my cane.” A few more such phrases are exchanged, and he walks out on a sung “goodbye.” In the street, he sings at an inquiring cab driver, “No thanks, I need some air,” and walks on as the cabbie takes up the tune, singing, as a man gets into his cab, “At last I’ve got a fare.” His passenger—a composer, apparently—picks up the melody from him, singing, “I think I’ll write that down,” and as he does so, sings the names of the melody’s notes, “A-B-A-F-E-D,” and so on. He leaves the cab at the railroad station, and still singing, gets on a train, where other passengers pick up the tune. Soldiers marching past as the train whizzes through a woodland take up the tune and it transforms into a march. Their troop marches past a gypsy camp, where a violinist takes up the tune, now romantic again, and his fellow gypsies accompany him as the camera pans to a palatial chateau where, on a balcony, Jeanette MacDonald lolls, dreaming of her ideal lover, and sings what has become the most familiar version of the lyric. We’ve gone from city to country, from Maurice’s tailor shop to Princess Jeanette’s castle, seamlessly and wittily, with a dozen changes being worked on the lyrics while the sweet, irrepressible melody continues. Not only have our two romantic leads been fully characterized by their versions of the song, but our minds have grasped that there is an unspoken and unexplained link between them, not only before they have ever met, but before either even knows the other exists. This is cinema at its most musical, with a welding of sound and image that can only be called absolute. The credited screenwriters on Love Me Tonight are Samuel Hoffenstein, who had also worked with Mamoulian on Jekyll and Hyde; George Marion Jr., who would later work with Rodgers and Hart on the stage musical Too Many Girls (1938); and Waldemar Young. No doubt they, and several uncredited colleagues, all made some significant contribution, but not to this sequence. From the time Emile comes out in his new suit to the end of Princess Jeanette’s chorus, the screen belongs to Mamoulian, Rodgers, and Hart. It leaves me breathless every time.
These two long sequences at the film’s very outset are balanced by two later montages that give us a droll picture of how Maurice’s advent has livened up the stuffy chateau. The first, which involves no rewriting of lyrics, comes after he has been invited—under the mistaken impression that he is a baron—to remain as a guest and, having seen and been smitten by Princess Jeanette, agrees. Instead of showing us his success at charming the aristocrats as a dinner guest, Mamoulian wittily cuts to the next morning, when we see the haughty characters we’ve already met delightedly singing “Mimi” (which we’ve already seen and heard Chevalier sing) as they go about their morning routines. (A segment of this, showing Myrna Loy as the man-hungry Countess Valentine, singing to herself as she lolls in bed in a filmy negligee, has been lost: It was cut during rerelease when the Production Code deemed it too erotic.) The sequence delightfully humanizes these seemingly one-dimensional characters for us, paving the way for the happy ending we’ve already long anticipated: Obviously they can’t all be stick-in-the-mud snobs if they so relish Maurice and his faintly saucy song.
The second montage sequence comes very near the film’s end, when—another inevitability—Maurice’s true identity is exposed, to everyone’s shock. Here, Hart and Mamoulian work an extra twist on the notion of class snobbery: Not only the aristocrats (and the family portraits on their walls!) are appalled at the temerity of a mere tailor passing himself off as one of them, but also their major-domo (Robert Greig) and all the underservants, who feel they’ve lost status by having waited on a commoner. (“I blacked his boots,” the Valet complains, “I should have blacked his eye,” while the chambermaid pouts at all the effort she has put into flirting with the half-dressed Maurice.) And it’s worth noting, on behalf of the screenwriting team, that the exposure does not come by force of circumstance. Maurice gives himself away through sheer professional expertise, sending Princess Jeanette’s dressmaker (Ethel Wales) into a tizzy by his insistence on retailoring the Princess’ riding habit.
The riding habit makes a handy key because two sequences, one midway through the film and one at its climax, involve runaway horses—one with the inexperienced Maurice on its back and the other urged on by the Princess, a champion rider, to catch up with the train on which Maurice, turned out of the chateau in disgrace, is heading back to Paris. Both include miniatures in comically speeded-up motion (Mamoulian has great fun with visual symmetries) and they balance each other neatly, since the haughty Princess is responsible for Maurice getting stuck with an unrideably wild horse. (The horse’s entrance is as funny as anything else in the picture.)
Framed at one end by the “Isn’t It Romantic?” sequence and at the other by “The Son of a Gun Is Nothing But a Tailor,” the movie’s center has a second, parallel frame, at each end of which the two lovers are erotically paired in song. At one end, they meet for the first time: Maurice’s car has broken down on the road to the chateau, and while the driver is tinkering with it, Jeanette comes riding through the woods in a pony cart, a prefiguration of the horseback adventures that will build tension later. She is singing “Lover” (which became another of the film’s standards), its lyric wittily tailored by Hart to include, as she rhapsodizes about the dream lover she hasn’t met, instructions to her horse. The horse tumbles her out of the cart; Maurice rescues her and begins making fervent love to her, in a more colloquial vein, with yet another hit song, “Mimi.” She cuts him off short and drives away.
Far different is their second sung romantic encounter, at the ball following the absurd hunt during which Maurice has escaped the runaway horse. Here they meet in the moonlit garden, and he makes love to her in a more courtly fashion with the movie’s title song; she plays along but resists. Daringly, Mamoulian crossfades, showing Princess Jeanette in bed, still dreaming of that ideal lover whom we now know (since the tune is “Love Me Tonight”) is Maurice. In a truly eyebrow-raising moment, Mamoulian splits the screen, so that we see Maurice, in his bed, equally lost in the dream. The illusion that they are in bed together, each dreaming of the other, lingers for only one startling moment, the film’s erotic peak. Even in the relaxed atmosphere of the pre-Code era, it must have been gasp-producing.
Much of the time between the lovers’ two romantic encounters is taken up with the activities of the chateau’s comic denizens, and here Mamoulian offers us a feast of quality playing. Few film musicals have ever boasted, or made such good use of, such a roster of beloved comedians: C. Aubrey Smith as the choleric Duke, the Princess’ uncle, who rules the roost at the chateau; Charlie Ruggles as the Viscount whose non-payment habits bring Maurice to the chateau; dryly funny Charles Butterworth as the Princess’ ineffectual suitor; Loy as the cheerfully lewd Countess Valentine (When someone asks her, “Can you go for a doctor?,” she replies, “Certainly. Bring him right in”); three beloved character actresses, Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies, and Blanche Friderici, as three spinster aunts (who speak verse and may also be the three Fates); Robert Greig, Paramount’s eternal butler, as the haughtiest of major-domos; and Joseph Cawthorn, a star of 1910s Broadway musicals, as the doctor who examines the Princess. (Cawthorn’s one delicious scene with MacDonald, sung and in rhyme, has regrettably been shorn of its song, “A Woman Needs Something Like That.” Damn the Production Code.)
Through it all, Mamoulian’s camera moves with elegant precision, never hurrying and never lingering pointlessly. One feels richly treated but never weighed down; the half-sung storytelling has a buoyancy that makes it seem to float above most other films of its kind or of its era. In musical film, I rank it as the gold standard.
Sadly, things never again worked out so perfectly for Rodgers and Hart in Hollywood. They continued their attempt to create a stylized film vocabulary, but their two subsequent tries, The Phantom President (1932) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933), both became misfires, in which they were saddled with dull or misguided directors, unworkable scripts, and stars—George M. Cohan in the one case and Al Jolson in the other—whose approaches could hardly harmonize with theirs. Much of the remainder of their Hollywood time, 1933–35, was spent in what might be described as infuriating indentured servitude under contract to MGM, where most of their projects came to nothing, and where Hart in particular found himself, as if on a treadmill, grinding out endless lyrics for alternative possible uses of the same tune. All that came out of their efforts were Hart’s very charming lyrics for Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow (1935), which again paired Chevalier and MacDonald, though under less than ideal auspices, and a project which Rodgers and Hart finally bought back from MGM for use as a stage musical: I Married an Angel. They ultimately turned their backs on Hollywood and returned to New York, to write a succession of shows that made musical theater history; their later encounters with the film industry were fleeting.
Mamoulian’s subsequent career followed a far more erratic line, veering from disasters to triumphs in Hollywood, and from Hollywood to Broadway (where he again scored both triumphs and mishaps) and back. His perfectionism and his somewhat peremptory ways gave him a reputation for being difficult, which was no problem when the result turned out to be Queen Christina (1933) with Garbo, or The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Tyrone Power, but counted strongly against a director if it led to fizzles like Song of Songs (1933) with Marlene Dietrich, or We Live Again! (1934)—the film on which Goldwyn actually did “instruct Anna Sten in diction.” Mamoulian never stopped experimenting. He shot the first feature film in the new three-strip Technicolor process, Becky Sharp (1935) with Miriam Hopkins, and color-keyed the stylized scenery to the shifting emotional temperature in Blood and Sand (1941), with Tyrone Power. Having triumphed once with Rodgers and Hart, he floundered with a musical about oil exploration in the Southwest, High, Wide, and Handsome (1937), despite a lovely score by Kern and Hammerstein. In the interim, he dazzled Broadway with the world premiere of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and, when his reputation was running low in Hollywood, recouped by scoring the monumental double triumph on Broadway of Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). His lesser but still notable theater achievements that followed included two more works involving artists of color, Harold Arlen’s St. Louis Woman (1946) and Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars (1949), with Porgy and Bess’ Todd Duncan again in the leading role.
Hollywood, however, proved a tougher nut to crack for Mamoulian in his later life. He did surprisingly well with MGM’s Freed unit, making Summer Holiday (1948) with Mickey Rooney, and Silk Stockings (1957), with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But there were long dry spells, and projects that never came to fruition. Most dishearteningly, he was fired from his last two films, both big-budget spectacles: One was the volatile situation of Porgy and Bess’ film version (1959), with a Black cast newly conscious of its position in the burgeoning civil rights movement; Mamoulian’s exacting but highhanded ways no longer suited them. (Many people involved, including the Gershwin estate, view even the final result, finished by Otto Preminger, rather glumly, and it is now virtually never shown.) Amid Mamoulian’s last venture was an even worse mishap: the Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton Cleopatra (1963), which no director seemed able to save. Mamoulian resigned from the untenable situation; the director who finally steered the sinking ship was Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Again, nobody involved pretended later that this was a happy experience.
The great sadness is that, when Love Me Tonight was finished, Paramount did not immediately set Mamoulian and Rodgers & Hart to work on a second project together. Possibly these three restless and questing souls preferred to go their separate ways. Or possibly Paramount sensed that the stylized sophistication of such a film was not a guarantee of audience success in the American market. (The film did well, but not all that well.) It seems a great pity. The little dollop of ambrosial perfection that the film brings probably couldn’t have been duplicated, but the team might have found still newer ways to astonish us. (Imagine if Mamoulian had invited Rodgers and Hart to musicalize Becky Sharp!) Their twin legacies are long and remarkable in any case. And there, at the magical intersection of a directorial eye, a songwriting team’s sweet-and-sour wit, and the variegated charms of two stars and a raft of droll supporting players, almost at the very beginning of sound film, stands Love Me Tonight, a work too slyly astute to be called pure frivolity, and too adorably frivolous to be weighed down with heavy meanings. Trying to explain it is no use; it must simply be loved.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
