Love Me Tonight

In this Oxford Guide to Film Musicals, renowned author Geoffrey Block introduces scholars, students, and general readers to a remarkable musical film, Love Me Tonight (1932), which has enjoyed considerably high esteem but remains less familiar than other acknowledged classics of its era. Individual chapters are devoted to the work's genesis and development of the screenplay, the songs and instrumental music, the role censorship has played in the history of the film, and the film's reception from its time to the modern day. The topics are informed by extensive archival holdings in several major library collections, as well as from the indispensable resources housed at the Paramount Studio archives. This Guide allows more space for the musical, literary, and dramatic dimensions that have received less emphasis in previous film studies and sheds new light on why Love Me Tonight is worthy of critical attention and respect.

Geoffrey Block is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music History and Humanities at the University of Puget Sound. He is the series editor for Oxford's Broadway Legacies and has published widely on American musical theater and film. His previous titles include Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, The Richard Rodgers Reader, and A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era.

Chapter 1: Introducing the Major Players and Developing the Screenplay for a Fairy Tale Musical
Chapter 2: Songs by Rodgers and Hart
Chapter 3: Rodgers the Musical “Auteur”: Instrumental Numbers, Leitmotivs, Borrowing, Allusions, and Underscoring
Chapter 4: Sex and Censorship
Chapter 5: The Reception of Love Me Tonight from Its Time to Ours
Index
Bibliography