character calls "The Song of Paris." Barrios describes the opening in detail: "As a bell tolls on the soundtrack, a series of shots show Paris in the early morning, each edit hitting with a chime. The camera focuses on a sleepy district where a laborer strikes the pavement with his pickax. Cut to a bum snoring in an alley, then a chairwoman sweeping a front step. Thump, snore, swish, and as more people begin their day the sounds grow in number and rhythm, the editing faster and more percussive. Clearly there’s a master in charge and his name is Mamoulian." Purdum describes the next highlight: A few minutes later, as a brief scene of tailor Chevalier and a customer ends, "he launches into one of Rodgers and Hart’s all-time great ballads, Isn’t It Romantic? Seamlessly, without a break, the scene shifts (as does the song) from the tailor, to the customer, to a passing taxi driver and his fare, to soldiers on a troop train, to a gypsy boy who overhears them, to a campfire where the music swells to the strains of gypsy violins, to the bedchamber of Princess Jeanette (played by Jeanette MacDonald) . . . The lyrics——really snatches of rhyming sung dialogue-—are so perfectly suited to the action that Hart had to write a more generic alternative for the published sheet music." Mamoulian's pathbreaking technique was so successful that it has been used in complicated song and dance sequences ever since. In addition to Isn’t It Romantic, the film features the classic Rodgers and Hart songs "Love Me Tonight", "Mimi", and "Lover". "Lover" is sung not romantically, as it often is in nightclubs, but comically, as MacDonald's character tries to control an unruly horse. In his book Hollywood in the Thirties, John Baxter wrote, “If there is a better musical of the Thirties, one wonders what it can be.” In 1990, Love Me Tonight was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Plot The story describes an encounter between a Parisian tailor named Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier) and a family of local aristocrats. These include Vicomte Gilbert de Varèze (Ruggles), who owes Maurice a large amount of money for tailoring work; Gilbert's uncle the Duc d'Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith), the family patriarch; d'Artelines' man-hungry niece Valentine (Loy); and his other 22-year-old niece, Princesse