Love Me Tonight (1932) and the Development of the Integrated Film Musical

Abstract

The 1932 film Love Me Tonight has been hailed for its influence on the development of the Hollywood musical genre, and is frequently cited as one of the first truly integrated musicals for the screen.1 Directed by Rouben Mamoulian with music by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, the film was a definitive aesthetic step away from the backstage musical of the early talkies, using songs to help tell the story instead of maintaining a separation between narrative and the spectacle of musical performance. Mamoulian claimed that in the film, “dialogue, song, and music were integrated into an organic unity.”2 And Rodgers similarly recounted that the creative team aimed for “dialogue, song and scoring [to] all be integrated as closely as possible so that the final product would have a unity of style and design.”3 Writers on the film musical have propagated this view, leaving the creative team’s claim to integration relatively unquestioned. Mark Grant, for instance, writes that Love Me Tonight was “arguably the first completely integrated musical comedy on stage or screen,” thanks to Mamoulian’s “holistically interweaving music, rhythm, blocking, and the ‘beats’ of the scene … to create a sculpture-in-motion that was not merely superficially exciting but expressive of the psychological subtext.”4 Similarly, Joseph Horowitz claims that “narrative structure and musical structure … prove one and the same.”5 Indeed, many of the filmic techniques in Love Me Tonight did become standard for Hollywood musicals of the next decades. Vincente Minnelli and Kurt Weill both subsequently called Love Me Tonight “the perfect film musical.”6