Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

lasttimeisaw Lubitsch's musical remake of his THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (1924), with George Cukor as the original director, another case of creativity discord for insiders to dig, stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald as a happily married middle class couple. It comes off as an accomplished guidance of how to manage your marriage while encountering flirtation or crazed suitors, a tad old school but it is pure fun. Constantly breaking the fourth wall with self-revealing asides, the smooth-talker Chevalier's obtrusive French accent and mellow chanson are contagiously prepossessing, an honest man cannot withhold his feelings towards a seductress (Tobin), his wife's best friend, on the other hand, a demure MacDonald, famous for her high-pitch soprano lilt, is an excellent option to cast as his high-strung wife, who in turn is the love interest of his husband's best friend (Ruggles), but generally she only fences with him and only becomes intimate with him as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth to Chevalier's philandering. So see the double standard here? Wife is not allowed to exude her real affection toward a third man while husband is granted full amnesty since Chevalier asks in our face "what will you do?", it's merely biological. But it is made in 1932, what do we expect? One singling-out scene is the awkward moment between Chevalier and Tobin's divorce-seeking husband (Young) when they first meet, Young's self-claim of himself as a man with absolute no sense of humour puts a preposterous veil of parody in this chamber comedy, all 6 main characters are well-selected, Genevieve Tobin is a natural force as a temptress with her heavily eye-lined vixen eyes, moreover, her singsongy communication with her husband is so naturalistically phoney. The mockery of woman's self-praising instinct is largely exculpatory, all the way, the film possesses an uplifting comical rhythm without overblown theatricality, and the musical numbers are soothingly intoxicating, you can have a wonderful one hour (and a bit more) with it.

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.

bkoganbing In the second of their four films together and the only one in which they start out as man and wife, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a happily married couple who face a comic crisis in their marriage when Jeanette announces she's going to be visited by an old friend in Genevieve Tobin in One Hour With You.What she doesn't know is that Tobin and Maurice have had a flirtatious rendezvous in one of those legendary speedy Paris taxi cabs. Tobin as Mitzi is one saucy wench whose marriage to Roland Young is coming to an end. The only question remaining is who will be caught in a compromising position first for the sake of the alimony.The whole thing is directed with typical continental charm by Ernest Lubitsch replete with various things in the film identified as the Lubitsch touch. My favorite of those is when Genevieve gets Dr. Chevalier to make a house call, you see a shot of her feet kicking off her shoes and then wiggling in anticipation.Oscar Straus and Leo Robin wrote most of the music, but the title song was written Richard Whiting with lyrics by Leo Robin. It's introduced during a nightclub scene by radio singer Donald Novis who occasionally did film and stage roles and then sung by nearly all the principals in the cast. Jeanette made a good selling RCA Victor recording of it.Maurice Chevalier got to sing Oh That Mitzi which both advances the plot of the film as he tells of his dilemma between his wife Colette{MacDonald), but Oh That Mitzi and is a number perfectly suiting his style. It was part of his nightclub act forever after.Genevieve Tobin is great as the saucy Mitzi and filmgoers probably know her best as the dowager Mrs. Chisholm who was held captive by Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. Tobin had to be one talented lady, that's quite a difference in parts between One Hour With You and The Petrified Forest.One cannot ignore Charlie Ruggles a rather timid suitor who is so hoping to get Jeanette on the rebound from Maurice. He's got some very funny scenes with her.One Hour With You is one of those sophisticated comedies depicting a world gone by. I'm not even sure in Europe if they still dress in tuxedo for dinner.

didi-5 Jeanette Macdonald is perhaps best known these days for her series of films with Nelson Eddy in the late 1930s/early 1940s, but this is a good example of her previous teaming with that naughty French export Maurice Chevalier.'One Hour With You' features several great songs plus a fluffy plot around a married couple and misunderstood flirtations - helped a lot by other cast members Genevieve Tobin, Roland Young, and Charles Ruggles. Chevalier's charming persona is served well here in asides to the camera and a couple of great solo numbers, while Macdonald is sparky, beguiling, and a real tease.