One Hour with You

1932 "Chevalier! Captivating all the world with laughter and love!"
7| 1h20m| NR| en
Details

Andre and Colette Bertier are happily married. When Colette introduces her husband to her flirtatious best friend, Mitzi, he does his best to resist her advances. But she is persistent, and very cute, and he succumbs. Mitzi's husband wants to divorce her, and has been having her tailed. Andre gets caught, and must confess to his wife. But Colette has had problems resisting the attentions of another man herself, and they forgive each other.

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Reviews

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
Benedito Dias Rodrigues Delightful sex comedy from this magnificent director Ernest Lubitsh,this time he explore a unfaithfulness using a happy couple played by Chevalier and Macdonald introducing a sexy friend of her to his faithful husband and how long he takes... she also pursued by a jealous husband who wants a prove of your unfaithfully to get a divorce...in other hand Macdonald is constantly harassed by a couple's friend without success....all women as gorgeous on a sexy dresses as Lubitsh would like implied...Lubitsh made a huge success in Hollywood with this kind of comedy and never was overcame by anyone...another Lubitsh's touch,fantastic movie!!! Resume: First watch: 2017 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8
Neil Doyle Ernst Lubitsch (with some "assist" from George Cukor) directs this charming and witty farce which gives Maurice Chevalier a chance to steal the film from his very talented co-stars, including Jeanette MacDonald and Genevieve Tobin.His rendering of "Oh, that Mitzi!" (he breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the camera--as in "Gigi" years later), and "Three Times A Day" remain the highlights of the film. The story itself is pure fluff, a tale about a happily married couple who each have a fling but remain faithful to each other for the finale. Of course, it's all pre-code morality done with style and wit.The sprinkling of songs also includes some rhyming dialogue, always a clever mix of words and music. Jeanette's voice sounds tinny here and there's no use made of her operatic range as the songs are simple and sweet, but she's charming and appealing as Chevalier's happily married wife. It's hard to see why she couldn't suspect that her best friend Genevieve Tobin would want to seduce her husband when the woman is such an obvious flirt. But of course, the story is strictly fluff and full of many improbable moments. The rather abrupt ending seems an awkward way to resolve the whole marital situation.Worth viewing to watch Maurice Chevalier deliver one of his most satisfying performances, especially good when addressing the audience with his problems. The catchy title song by Richard Whiting gets some nice singing moments from several players.
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.
theowinthrop In the second of the four Chevalier - MacDonald films the leads are a married couple (Chevalier is a upper class doctor, of all things) who are happy together. In fact they are first seen preparing for their anniversary party. Both have friends who can spoil this. Chevalier's closest friend is Charlie Ruggles, who secretly loves MacDonald (but who is usually too nervous or intense to get anywhere with her - if she were interested). MacDonald is close to an old school friend, Genevieve Tobin, who is a continuous flirt (one can even consider her a nymphomaniac). She is married to Roland Young, but their marriage is on the rocks because of her affairs (his too - he wants to marry their maid). So MacDonald invites her friend into her home, and Tobin soon is being coquettish towards Chevalier. When she returns home, she asks him to see her on a professional (i.e. medical) problem, and proceeds to try to seduce him. This upsets Chevalier, who tries to remain faithful to MacDonald, but she (blind as she is to what Tobin is doing) insists he help her friend. Young is delighted. He is closing in on a divorce with Tobin. Finally, being weak, Chevalier gives in. MacDonald learns of this, and turns to Ruggles (!). And the film is set for some kind of resolution of these problems in sexual politics.The music is best recalled for the title tune, "One Hour With You". It would pop up for years in Paramount film musicals (in DUCK SOUP, it is played in the sequence when Harpo Marx is doing a "Paul Revere" ride to rally the countryside, only to stop at his girlfriend's for "one hour with her."). It also appeared as the national love song of Klopstokia in MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, with Jack Oakie singing the words, "Woof bootle gik..." instead of the original words to it. However, the number that gets me is the one mentioned in the "Summary" line, which Chevalier sings to explain to the audience his dilemma regarding his loyalties to his wife versus the fascination of the beguiling Tobin. In all of his films in the 1930s he would sing some tune that dealt with the heroine or another woman: "Mimi" in LOVE ME TONIGHT is an example, as is "Louise". "MITZI" is another example of this.The Lubitsch touch is shown throughout. One of the best moments is when Ruggles is talking to MacDonald about attending a party at their home, and learns it is a dinner party, not the costume party he is dressed for. He turns to his butler, and demands to know why he told Ruggles it was a costume party. "Oh sir," says the giggling butler, "I so wanted to see you in tights!" With bits like that sprinkled about, this film is a small treasure.