In the mid-1930s, Grace Moore became one of the few opera singers to become a movie star, but it was not the first time she had defied career expectations. Born in Slabtown, Tennessee, the self-described "hillbilly" quit college to work as a nightclub singer to pay for classical singing lessons, and had beaten big odds and left a flourishing career in Broadway musicals to focus on opera. After making a well-received debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1928, she went on to European success in Paris. The opposite of the American perception of an opera singer as plump, screechy and foreign, the blond, attractive and slim Moore was inevitably courted by Hollywood. Her first film, MGM's A Lady's Morals (1930), a fictionalized biography of Swedish singer Jenny Lind, was a flop at least in part because the public was tiring of the glut of musicals in that early sound film era. Moore persevered, and in 1934 restarted her film career at Columbia with One Night of Love. The film earned an Oscar nomination as best picture and Moore was nominated as best actress. It was a hit, and Moore briefly became one of the top ten moneymakers in movies, always billed, as befits a diva, as "Miss Grace Moore."
In Love Me Forever, Moore plays an impoverished upper-class girl who goes to work as a nightclub singer owned by a music-loving gangster, Steve Corelli, played by Leo Carillo. She's a success, and Steve, by then in love with her, helps her achieve her goal of auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera even though he knows he may lose her. The part gave Carillo a rare opportunity to play a romantic lead. The Los Angeles native came from a prominent Hispanic Southern California family, and was a university graduate who spoke five languages. He played mostly supporting roles in more than ninety films, and in the 1950s, he gained nationwide popularity as the comic sidekick in the television series The Cisco Kid.
Director Victor Schertzinger was an accomplished musician and composer who had begun his career in silent film comedies. With the arrival of sound, his musical skills served him well as a director of film musicals, and he also began writing songs for those films, including the title songs for Love Me Forever and One Night of Love. Among his best known pop songs are "Tangerine" and "I Remember You."
When Grace Moore's film career faded in the late 1930s, she returned to the stage, opera, and concert work, and toured with the USO during World War II. She died in a plane crash in Europe in 1947. MGM made a highly-fictionalized film biography of Moore, So This Is Love, starring their resident diva Kathryn Grayson, in 1953.
Director: Victor Schertzinger
Screenplay: Jo Swerling, Sidney Buchman, story by Victor Schertzinger
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Editor: Gene Milford, Viola Lawrence, Aaron Nibley
Costume Design: Elizabeth Courtney
Art Direction: Stephen Goosson
Music: Victor Schertzinger
Principal Cast: Miss Grace Moore (Margaret Howard), Leo Carillo (Steve Corelli), Robert Allen (Phillip Cameron), Spring Byington (Clara Fields), Michael Bartlett (La Boheme co-star), Luis Alberini (Luigi), Douglas Dumbrille (Miller), Thurston Hall (Maurizzio)
90 minutes
by Margarita Landazuri
