WHAT’S MORE
When Mamoulian signed on to direct, he decided that the script, based on a French play called The Tailor in the Castle, required major overhauling. The rewrites pushed back the start of production again and again until finally it collided with Chevalier’s upcoming concert tour. Paramount was then forced to pay off the theaters that had booked him. This and other unplanned expenses made it (at $1 million) one of the year’s most expensive films. As with King of Jazz, it was too costly to earn a profit at a time when musicals were out of favor with the public.
Like such other major early-1930s films as King Kong and Mata Hari, Love Me Tonight was a victim of the notorious Motion Picture Production Code, which began to monitor movies’ content in 1934. When Paramount reissued Love Me Tonight in 1949, the Code demanded the deletion of some mildly risqué material, most notably a song performed by Jeanette and her doctor called “A Woman Needs Something Like That.” Also missing were references to a local shrine called the Virgin’s Spring, plus Myrna Loy singing “Mimi” while wearing a semi-transparent negligee. The only comfort was that, unlike some other Code-slashed titles, the cuts were not done in too jarring a fashion. While Kong and some others have been restored, the Love Me Tonight footage is still missing and presumed lost. The search for a complete print goes on.
MUSICALLY SPEAKING
Copies of Mamoulian’s virtuoso “Isn’t It Romantic?” sequence appeared in several subsequent films. The most irreverent one came in the RKO comedy Diplomaniacs (1933), with comedian Bert Wheeler in drag as Jeanette MacDonald. Since Paramount owned the rights to the song itself, as well as to “Mimi” and “Lover,” all three soon began to turn up as background scoring in the studio’s feature films, short subjects, cartoons and, later, television shows. From 1932 to the twenty-first century, those Richard Rodgers melodies have become permanently lodged in the ears and subconscious minds of millions of spectators.
Charles Butterworth and Jeanette MacDonald