Love Me Tonight is a 1932 American pre-Code musical comedy film produced and directed by Rouben Mamoulian, with music by Rodgers and Hart. It stars Maurice Chevalier as a tailor who poses as a nobleman and Jeanette MacDonald as a princess with whom he falls in love. It also stars Charles Ruggles as a penniless nobleman, along with Charles Butterworth and Myrna Loy as members of his family. Film critic Richard Barrios calls Love Me Tonight "magical, rapturous, unique, charming, audacious, unforgettable, and, to beat a warhorse, masterpiece." He adds, "It remains less well-known than it warrants even as vastly inferior works are enshrined. . . . It is, after all, quite a provable truth: Love Me Tonight is a great film, and along with Singin' in the Rain and a very few others it resides at the very pinnacle of movie musicals, and at the apex of art." The film is an adaptation by Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr. and Waldemar Young of the play Le Tailleur au château ("The tailor at the castle") by Paul Armont and Léopold Marchand. This was Rodgers and Hart’s second motion picture. In 1930, dealing with losses from the stock market collapse in 1929, they accepted a lucrative three-picture contract from Jack Warner and went to Hollywood. Unfortunately the film they were assigned had one star who couldn’t sing and another with a very limited range, so they were limited it what they could write. When the film flopped in 1931, Warner quickly bought out their contract. Later the same year, Paramount Publix, now Paramount Pictures, hired then to work on this film with singing stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette McDonald and innovative director Reuben Mamoulian, a recent immigrant from Armenia who had directed the play Porgy on Broadway three years earlier. Working together the director and songwriters "devised a singular method of staging a musical film using a previously underutilized tool: the camera itself," biographer Todd S. Purdum writes. Rodgers explained, "What we had in mind was not only moving the camera and the performers, but having the entire scene move. There was no reason why a musical sequence could not be used like dialogue and be performed uninterrupted while the action took the story to whatever locations the director wanted." Mamoulian opened the film, as he had Porgy, with "a steadily growing symphony of everyday sounds as Paris awakens," what Chevalier's