A Film Canon

If 42nd Street deconstructs the theatrical musical, Love Me Tonight attempts to rival it, offering the melody, rhythm and choreography of the everyday world as a substitute for the ceremony of the stage. Mamoulian emphasises everything song-like about speech, as well as everything dance-like about human movement, collapsing these distinctions in such a way as to construe the musical as a distinctly realistic, cinematic gesture - particularly evident at those moments when cinematic techniques, such as slow-motion, fast-motion and sound editing, bring out an otherwise invisible grace, organisation or efficiency. However, it finds most elegant expression in Mamoulian's use of the musical sequence to extend the panoramic sensibility encapsulated in his characteristic tracking-shot. The opening number, "The Song Of Paree", starts with a percussive combination of diverse urban noises, while "Isn't It Romantic?" proves sufficiently contagious to encompass tailor's shop, taxi, train, army barracks, gypsy encampment and, finally, aristocratic country estate. As this example might suggest, Mamoulian's reduction of the entire physical world to a common theatrical denominator has profound egalitarian implications, clearest in "The Son Of A Gun Is Nothing But A Tailor", whose ostensible affirmation of aristocratic isolationism is undermined by the camera's depiction of every member of the household as a choral participant (footmen, cooks, washerwomen, maids, representations of various aristocratic generations), producing an architectural fragmentation that recalls Rene Clair, and justifying the protagonist's comic claim to be an embodiment of the French Revolution.