She Loves Me Not is a 1934 American comedy film directed by Elliott Nugent and starring Bing Crosby and Miriam Hopkins.[1] Based on the novel She Loves Me Not by Edward Hope and the subsequent play by Howard Lindsay, the film is about a cabaret dancer who witnesses a murder and is forced to hide from gangsters by disguising herself as a male Princeton student. Distributed by Paramount Pictures, the film has been remade twice as True to the Army (1942) and as How to Be Very, Very Popular in (1955), the latter starring Betty Grable. The film is notable for containing one of the first major performances of Bing Crosby, and it helped launch him to future stardom. This was also the last film that Miriam Hopkins made under her contract to Paramount Pictures, which began in the early 1930s upon her arrival in Hollywood. In 1935, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for "Love in Bloom", theme song of comedian Jack Benny.[2]
The film was one of Paramount's biggest hits of the year.[5]
Mordaunt Hall, writing in The New York Times, liked it saying, "As on the stage, this adaptation is a swift-paced piece of hilarity, with occasional romantic interludes during which Bing Crosby and Kitty Carlisle contribute some tuneful melodies. Some of the farcical episodes in this Paramount offering are apt to recall that famous old comedy, "Charley's Aunt", but in the present production, instead of having a varsity student in skirts, they dress up a cabaret girl in male attire after she has invaded a dormitory room."[6]
Variety had a mixed reaction "...But apart from this possible captiousness Par's ‘She Loves’ holds plenty for the gate. Crosby is most of it. He looks better than ever (somehow his stature has been built up although the faintest suggestion of embonpoint doesn't quite jell with a Princeton undergrad), but he acts intelligently and sings those tunes. The songs will be no small asset to the film. There are three outstanders, two by Revel and Gordon—‘Straight from the Shoulder (Right from the Heart),’ and ‘I’m Hummin’, (I'm Singin’, I'm Whistlin’) and one by Robin and Rainger (‘Love in Bloom’) — and the latter is the smash hit of the flicker and currently Tin Pan Alley's No. 1 song, so it's easy to figure out the b.o. reaction."[7]
^Reynolds, Fred (1986). Road to Hollywood. Gateshead, UK: John Joyce. p. 62.
^DOUGLAS W. CHURCHILL.HOLLYWOOD (Dec 30, 1934). "THE YEAR IN HOLLYWOOD: 1934 May Be Remembered as the Beginning of the Sweetness-and-Light Era". New York Times. p. X5.
^The New York Times. September 8, 1934. ((cite journal)): Missing or empty |title= (help)
