This is sheer delight-nothing new in the story line, but such music and such directorial pacing, plus exuberant and lovely performances from MacDonald and Novarro with able support from Butterworth and Morgan.
This is a brisk film- adapting Kern and Harbach's operetta/musical comedy pastiche from 1931 (355 performances on Broadway, just under a year, despite the MGM posters' boasts that it played two years on Broadway).
Songs are rarely production numbers, they start, they are expanded, they are re-prised, much like what Hammerstein wanted musical theater to be {Kern had created SHOW BOAT with Hammerstein four years earlier and perhaps caught the bug].
Both MacDonald and Novarro are wonderful, romantic and with great chemistry. Charles Butterworth is wonderful as always in support, as is Frank Morgan.
This was the fifth and final film of Vivienne Segal, Broadway star of Rodgers and Hart's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE and PAL JOEY. She made 5 full length films, four of them in full two- strip Technicolor - two are lost, one survives in black and white only. She has here two sequences as an established star - one 3.5 minutes and one 3 minutes. It's her farewell to film, but she exits beautifully and wisely.
The numbers: Impressions In A Harlem Flat (piano); She Didn't Say Yes; A New Love Is Old; The Night Was Made For Love; I Watched The Love Parade; The Breeze Kissed Your Hair; One Moment Alone; Try To Forget.
The hits were of course the standards: She Didn't Say Yes and The Night Was Made For Love.
There is a three strip Technicolor finale that lasts four minutes.
Most enjoyable and an absolute delight!
This is a brisk film- adapting Kern and Harbach's operetta/musical comedy pastiche from 1931 (355 performances on Broadway, just under a year, despite the MGM posters' boasts that it played two years on Broadway).
Songs are rarely production numbers, they start, they are expanded, they are re-prised, much like what Hammerstein wanted musical theater to be {Kern had created SHOW BOAT with Hammerstein four years earlier and perhaps caught the bug].
Both MacDonald and Novarro are wonderful, romantic and with great chemistry. Charles Butterworth is wonderful as always in support, as is Frank Morgan.
This was the fifth and final film of Vivienne Segal, Broadway star of Rodgers and Hart's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE and PAL JOEY. She made 5 full length films, four of them in full two- strip Technicolor - two are lost, one survives in black and white only. She has here two sequences as an established star - one 3.5 minutes and one 3 minutes. It's her farewell to film, but she exits beautifully and wisely.
The numbers: Impressions In A Harlem Flat (piano); She Didn't Say Yes; A New Love Is Old; The Night Was Made For Love; I Watched The Love Parade; The Breeze Kissed Your Hair; One Moment Alone; Try To Forget.
The hits were of course the standards: She Didn't Say Yes and The Night Was Made For Love.
There is a three strip Technicolor finale that lasts four minutes.
Most enjoyable and an absolute delight!