Love Me Forever

Love Me Forever (Columbia) makes it seem probable that the history of grand-opera cinema will not only parallel that of musicomedy in the movies by sticking to one general story but will even copy the same story over & over. As in Grace Moore's preceding picture, One Night of Love, the heroine of Love Me Forever is a struggling opera singer. In this one Miss Moore meets an underworld cabaret owner (Leo Carrillo) who falls in love with her, contrives to get her a job with the Metropolitan Opera, suffers severe pangs until she gives up the notion of marrying a Boston socialite.

The excuse, if one exists, for backstage stories lies in the fact that the cinema regards itself as a realistic medium. Consequently, producers feel obliged when introducing music to make it, not an integral item in their story, but part of a story within a story which can then be relegated to the less realistic medium of the theatre. In operatic cinema, this complex convention applies even more strongly, since it confers the additional advantage of making it unnecessary to compose a lot of new music. Love Me Forever is therefore both an original story and a sort of sugar-coated version, once removed, of La Boheme, in which Miss Moore, as Mimi, finally makes her gala debut.

Under these circumstances, admirers of cinematic grand opera should be pleased to learn that Miss Moore again proves more thoroughly equal to the task of impersonating a sensationally successful grand-opera star than she was to that of being one when she sang at London's Covent Garden before Queen Mary last month (TIME. June 24). Her voice which, in Columbia's recording of it, sounds better than any other in the cinema, is as good as usual. Her talent for light comedy makes the laborious convolutions of Victor Schertzinger's story seem almost enjoyable. Leo Carrillo croaks so amiably that he may hereafter head Hollywood's oversized roster of dialect leading men. Best sounds: the Love Duet, from Act I of La Boheme, in which Michael Bartlett outsings Miss Moore.

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