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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.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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.
Summary
In this Oxford Guide to Film Musicals, renowned author Geoffrey Block introduces scholars, students, and general readers to the remarkable musical film, Love Me Tonight (1932) from a accessible musicological perspective, giving readers of all stripes new ways to hear this classic film.
