Like René Clair in France, Rouben Mamoulian in Hollywood was a master of “selective” sound. In his first sound film, Applause (1929), he freed the camera from its sound booth, and used off-screen and even overlapping dialogue. He introduced two-channel recording and mixing of sound. If some critics today consider Love Me Tonight to be “the first genuinely creative American musical,” this is largely due to the freedom with which Mamoulian experimented with both sound and visuals. In this splendid fantasy, carping women actually bark, a sleepy household moves in slow motion, and Rodgers' and Hart's songs (including “Isn't It Romantic” and “Mimi”) are flawlessly integrated into the plot progression. Lyrics are used to move the plot forward, music captures the movement of the camera and editing, and shots and sounds together take on a musical beat. The script abounds in pre-Production Code, saucy double entendres. Maurice Chevalier stars as a Parisian tailor who is taken for a baron when he enters the mansion where Princess Jeanette MacDonald is wasting away (“no,” corrects her doctor, “but wasted, yes”), and Countess Myrna Loy suffers, more verbally, from the same ailment (“can't we ever get a footman under forty in this place?”). Mamoulian comes naturally to his first film musical; his Broadway production of Porgy, with its “symphony of noises,” was a huge success in 1927.