Maytime (1937)

Just a couple of years too early for this kind of romantic fantasy extravaganza to benefit from Technicolor photography, its splendid black and white photography and editing interrupt a formula romantic fantasy tale about a professional performer forced to make choices about lifestyle vs career priorities. The interruption comes at the midpoint of this long film as the only portion credited to the operetta composer Siegmund Romberg. Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy, romantically photographed amidst fantasy blossoms and rippling water,deliver a haunting, ethereal love duet which evokes one's tears of memory and lives forever in our hears. The rest of the film, constituting its first and second halves, features such familiar stars of the era as John Barrymore and Herman Bing joining Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy at their absolute best with good musical interludes, good theme material about the angst of a future, present and past professional performing career, and a well spun tale which holds your interest.

Having seen Sweethearts and Rose-Marie and liking them, I saw Maytime expecting to like it. But I found myself loving it. Of these three, Maytime for me has the most believable story, it is poignant and heartfelt yet heart warming too.That's not all though. The production values are rich and beautiful, the songs especially Sweetheart(which I can't get enough of) are superb same with the direction, and the script is sweet and poignant.The performances are wonderful too. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy work so well together and sing stunningly, while John Barrymore gives my personal favourite support performance of any support actor/actress in a MacDonald-Eddy film.In conclusion, I loved it. 10/10 Bethany Cox

It's fascinating to read in all the well justified praise (and occasional cavil) lavished on the glorious hodge-podge that is MAYTIME, not one word of the great feature film debut at MGM which the film also represented.Since MAYTIME - first filmed in 1923 in a version more faithful to the original but as a "silent" film, lacking ALL of the original music - was contractually obligated to ONLY credit music to the great Sigmund Romberg (whose original show it had been when it opened on Broadway on August 16, 1917, to play for a then astounding 492 performances with songs the studio did not want to use like "Jump, Jim Crow"), the studio called in their youngest contracted composer/lyricists (then only 21 and earning a mere - but lordly during the Depression - $200 a week), Bob Wright and George (Chet) Forrest, who would be willing to do virtually the entire score (not allowed to actually compose, but adapting public domain material under chief studio composer - and early Oscar Hammerstein collaborator - Herbert Stothart's supervision). Wright and Forrest were relegated to billing only for "Special Lyrics by..." (and not even acknowledged for THAT by the IMDb, although the credits are there on the screen!). The film's "Best Score" Oscar nomination didn't even go to Romberg or supervising composer Stothart, but to Nat W. Finston, the head of the studio's Music Division!It was years before "The Boys" would break into the public consciousness with stage adaptations of their own like SONG OF NORWAY and KISMET, and their own (always their first choice) original music for shows like KEAN and GRAND HOTEL, but the result on MAYTIME (including their faux Russian opera for the film, drawn from Tschaikowsky's 5th Symphony, translated from their original English into French by another poet not credited by IBDB - in a talk at the New York Sheet Music Society in 1989, Bob Wright said it was U.S. Sigey, but the screen credits say Gilles Guilbert) was a triumph of craft and carefully catering to the strengths of the stars who they were writing for. Witness in particular a couple numbers ("Song of The Carriage" and a number where Eddy proposes to prepare a ham and egg breakfast for MacDonald) crafted for the limited acting range of Nelson Eddy, giving him something to DO while he sang! LOTS of great Broadway names worked under almost forgotten under-billed capacities (Larry Hart of Rodgers & Hart fame did lyrics for the Maurice Chevalier MERRY WIDOW!), but Wright & Forrest were among the most prolific and best, and MAYTIME was their first major film "credit." It's only a pity (given the high quality of their few surviving original scores) that in the ways of Hollywood, MAYTIME also "typecast" them into adapting other composers' works for the bulk of their careers.

This was by far Jeanette MacDonald's best film when teamed up with Nelson Eddy.An elderly woman, counseling young lovers, thinks back to her tragic love affair during the Napoleonic era. Both Nelson and Eddy are at their usual singing best and for a change, Eddy acts the part. He has often been criticized for poor acting in his other films with the wonderful MacDonald.John Barrymore was literally robbed of a best supporting Oscar nomination for his tyrannical role of a lover and husband of MacDonald. It was his inability to accept that MacDonald had found true love with Eddy that leads to tragedy.Too bad that this wonderful film wasn't in color since the set scenes of the Napoleonic era are beautifully realized.