AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Tockinit not horrible nor great

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Steffi_P Oh, it is good to see Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald together again. Since their first coupling in 1929's The Love Parade, each had been paired with a number of other stars with varying success. For One Hour with You, it is charmingly effective to see them as an established couple rather than two singletons meeting and falling in love. Both have matured and improved in the years since their first appearance together, and they make a delightfully appropriate match.Chevalier is boundlessly entertaining as always. There seems to be no end to the amusingly exaggerated gestures and utterances he can come out with. MacDonald, who in her earlier pictures had had an unintelligible (albeit beautiful) operatic singing voice, now delivers her vocals with clarity or character. She has also refined her comedic sensibilities, and is almost a match for Chevalier in quirkiness. And this is perhaps the best supporting casts the two were ever aligned with. Genevieve Tobin is not a well-known player, but she is marvellous here, projecting a kind of confident, overbearing flirtatiousness. Listen to the way she pronounces "sex" in the cab scene – she says it in the sense of male or female, but she is clearly thinking of its other meaning. Playing her husband, Roland Young is full of little mannerisms that are inexplicably funny, and Charles Ruggles is superbly creepy in the role of Adolph.Director Ernst Lubitsch, in spite of the increasing freedom of camera movement, appears to have simplified his technique as the talkies have progressed. Much of One Hour with You is shot in long, static takes. This is all the better to show off the superb talents of the stars, and their routines are allowed to play out undisturbed. That is not to say Lubitsch is not thinking about what he is doing. His shot composition is, as usual, geared towards lucidity, minimalism and aesthetic beauty. The images contain nothing to distract, they simply look good and focus all our attention on the performers.At the time, Paramount was at the forefront of developing the screen musical, and in the early years of the talkies we see the genre becoming more abstract and pure. One Hour with You is famed for its rhyming dialogue, a great device which perks up potentially dull scenes and keeps the musicality alive, but there is more going on besides. There is a neat use of incidental music based on the melodies of the songs, which is used to comment not only tonally but also verbally on each situation. For example the tune of "What a Little Thing Like a Wedding Ring Can Do" is played in a number of different styles at appropriate moments, reminding us of the song's lyrics in a new context.Chevalier and MacDonald would make a few more pictures together, and indeed they made better pictures together, but One Hour with You is perhaps the pinnacle of their screen partnership because it is the picture in which they worked best together as a couple. MacDonald would soon go on to an even more famous and prolific pairing with Nelson Eddy, who while pretty good was no Maurice. And Chevalier was to return to his native France, where in any case his advancing years began to exclude him from playing romantic leads. One Hour with You is not an outstanding musical as the genre goes, but it is classic Chevalier and MacDonald.

Cyke 106: One Hour With You (1932) - released 3/23/1932, viewed 7/10/08.KEVIN: What? They're married?! And they're in love?! But the movie just started! Yes, Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald reunite in Ernst Lubitsch's inevitable remake of his silent film The Marriage Circle, based on the play Only A Dream by Lothar Schmidt. Naturally, the best advantage of the switch from silent to talkie is getting to hear Chevalier's accent rattling off more of Lubitsch's impeccable dialogue. Obviously not content to make a normal sex comedy, Lubitsch throws in not only musical numbers, but also several dialogue scenes made of Moliere-esquire rhyming couplets. The two leads, Chevalier and MacDonald, absolutely devour their roles. They're sensational to watch, and I look forward to a few more team-ups from them in the future. Genevieve Tobin is very good as best friend and possible home-wrecker Mitzi, the loose trophy wife who makes things interesting for our happily married heroes. Roland Young is also fantastic as Mitzi's exasperated professor husband, who's just waiting for something to happen that will justify a divorce, showing it with a deadpan delivery of the funniest lines in the movie. ("When I married her, she was a brunette. Now you can't believe anything she says.") Not to mention Lubitsch regular Charles Ruggles as the wife's dweebish old flame who's still aching to get some quality time in with the wife.DOUG: This is Lubitsch's remake to Marriage Circle, his own earlier adaptation of Schmidt's Only A Dream. All the same players are in place: The happily married couple, the flirty best friend, her boring husband, and the wife's lusty ex. In order: Chevalier brings his usual manly Frenchy charm as Andre, and Jeanette MacDonald works her best comedy muscles as his lovely society wife Collette. Genevieve Tobin plays Mitzi, determined to get her claws into Andre no matter what it may do to him and his marriage to her best friend. Roland Young plays Mitzi's supremely uncool husband, apparently bored and repulsed by his wife's flirty antics. Charles Ruggles rounds out the cast as Collette's airheaded ex Adolph. In 99% of the movies made in this period, marriage is either something people try to get into or get out of, so what a surprise it is to start a film with the two leads not only already married, but very much in love. I like to pretend this movie is kind of an informal sequel to any of the other movies starring Chevalier and MacDonald. After the events of a movie like The Love Parade, or Love Me Tonight, or The Merry Widow, where they spend the whole movie courting each other, here we get to see them after they've settled down and are living together, still without losing their fantastic chemistry. So which version is better, silent or talkie? That's hard to say. Circle was such a wonderful discovery, a silent film where all the charming sexual shenanigans still hold up today. However, I'll go with this version, which has Chevalier and MacDonald, and a more experienced Lubitsch running the show (with an assist from an uncredited George Cukor), who adds in many songs and scenes spoken in rhyming couplets. (I thought the scene where Andre attempts to switch the placecards flowed more naturally in the original, though; here, it's a tad clunky). Last film: Shanghai Express (1932). Next film viewed: It Happened One Night (1934). Next film chronologically: Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).

tedg Sometimes these old films are useful if only because they are a fossilized record of the evolution of certain film techniques. Here it is the technique of the main character looking directly at and addressing the audience outside of the story. As this really is expertly put together, there are many discrete steps of reality woven into this. There's the standard overlay of play and song that musicals had for decades. But there's also a couple other modes: one in which the characters speak their lines in rhyme. And a more subtle level where the tone is more deliberately artificial, play-like.Incidentally, I have mentioned elsewhere that the current reputation of Paris as a romantic place was largely manufactured by the US film industry using hidden subsidies. The idea was attract US tourist dollars as part of the Marshall plan. Before the war, it was a place of sex without romance. Romance was deliberately out of the equation. You can see that here. The one hour is all that is required for the liaison that matters.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

peterjohndean I first saw this film in 1955 at a tiny art cinema in Oxford. The print was in perfect condition and the shimmering dresses and art deco were fascinating. I sat through three showings and left on a wave of good feeling which has lasted ever since. (I can still sing "Three Times a Day" in which Chevalier as a doctor prescribes pills to his patient (with its the sexual innuendo). The comparison with Mamoulian's"Love me Tonight" with the same principals is very interesting. Mamoulian sends up the aristocratic Ruritanian musical comedy while Lubitsch adores the middle class. Both in their different ways are brilliant. Both use surrealist effects to heighten a sense of unreality. This is pure entertainment in a European tradition. Genevieve Tobin is a wonderful support but her career never really took off.