A love affair with Chevalier’s musical

Larry Smith loves “Love Me Tonight” so much he took it on his honeymoon.

Romantically so, that’s the number one reason on his top 10 list of why this 1932 movie musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald — playing tonight in the Mount Pony Theater — is his all-time favorite.

Engaged to his love Jenny at a film festival, Smith — nitrate film specialist at the Library of Congress in Culpeper — married his bride three years ago, eloping to the Ohio estate where Bogie married Bacall 60 years earlier.

Film buffs both, Jenny and Larry were most cozy then wrapped in blankets watching “Love Me Tonight” by moonlight on their honeymoon outside of a secluded log cabin.

Smith packed all the necessary equipment in the trunk of the car — 16-millimeter movie print, check; projector, check; speakers, check; wires, check; bed sheet, check — before their post-nuptials getaway.

“We decided let’s string up the sheets, we got out the projector and for our own entertainment watched ‘Love Me Tonight’ on that chilly May night,” said Smith, 51, a Dayton, Ohio native who now lives in Culpeper with his wife, who also works at the Library of Congress.

Yes, there was snuggling involved, but no movie night was not their wedding night.

So wise and knowing is “Love Me Tonight” that Smith wants the whole world to come enjoy tonight’s screening in Culpeper, or at least the local population.

He identified the film as the best black and white musical ever, comparable to the in-Technicolor “Singin’ In the Rain” with Gene Kelly from 1952.

For its critical acclaim, infectious music, charming plot, expert direction and cinematic invention, “Love Me Tonight” elicits passion in Smith, who saw the 76-year-old film for the first time in the 1990s.

“The film is wise, knowing, life-embracing and absolutely beautiful,” he says. “Words fail: just see it.”

Set in France, “Love Me Tonight” opens at sunrise in enchanted Paris, where Chevalier is a tailor with a song in his step.

The sounds of the city blend, build and overlap “to create this symphony of music,” Smith said, setting the scene for a stunning sequence in which the lead male sings of meeting the girl of his dreams in “Isn’t It Romantic?” an old-fashioned “love song” by Hart and Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

“Soon I will have found some girl that I can adore. Isn’t it romantic? While I sit around, my love can scrub the floor. She’ll kiss me every hour or she’ll get the sack and when I take a shower she can scrub my back.”

Love is a battlefield, that’s for sure.

Smith mentioned this melodious, continuous scene more than once as an example of how the song lyrics “actually propel the plot instead of stopping the story flat as was the custom of most musicals.” In a taxi, on a train, through the countryside sung by soldiers and performed by a gypsy on his violin, “Isn’t It Romantic?” eventually reaches the ears — and vocal chords — of our lovelorn princess, Jeanette, brooding in a nearby castle.

“She picks up the song Maurice started so they have actually shared a song without even having met,” Smith says.

Unfortunately, this seemingly delightful movie was removed from public view for half-a-century just two years after its release when the long-since defunct “National League of Decency” deemed it too suggestive.

When it finally started showing again in the 1980s on TV, the initial 104-minute movie had been whittled down, original footage lost to time. It wasn’t released on video until 2003, Smith said.

By today’s standards, he added, “Love Me Tonight” wouldn’t even be considered racy enough for a PG rating.

The version that shows tonight in the Mount Pony Theater spans 88 minutes and is the longest surviving copy in the Library’s collection.

It’s well worth a watch, Smith said, but moviegoers best be careful.

“This is the kind of film that will turn them on to becoming a film buff, to start taking risks.”

Smooth, polished, sweet and bubbly all at once, the mood of “Love Me Tonight” is contagious, he said. “No matter how you feel when you come in, you will walk out on cloud nine.”

Allison Brophy Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or