Here's to Romance (1935) review: Opera, petty revenge, and weirdly intense stares

If you have a soft spot for dusty 1930s musical melodrama with lots of opera singing, then yes, Here's to Romance is worth your afternoon. But if operatic belting makes your teeth hurt, you will absolutely hate this one within ten minutes.

It's basically a movie about rich people having incredibly petty revenge wars using attractive young artists as pawns. Genevive Tobin plays Kathleen, a high-society wife who gets totally fed up with her husband always sponsoring pretty young "artistic" girls.

So what does she do? She gets her own handsome male protege, a tenor named Nino, and sends him off to Paris. 🤷‍♂️

Nino Martini plays the singer, and honestly, the guy can sing his head off. His acting is a bit stiff, like he is constantly waiting for the director to yell cut so he can go drink some tea.

His character has a lovely girlfriend played by Anita Louise, and they are perfectly happy. That is, until the rich Gerards show up in Paris to check on thier "investment."

The Awkward Rich-People Energy

The funniest part of the film is how blatant Kathleen is about her interest in Nino. She is not even trying to hide it, and her husband just sort of stands there looking slightly annoyed but mostly bored.

It reminds me a bit of the cynical relationship dynamics in Bedside, another mid-30s flick where people just use each other without much shame. Except here, they wrap it all up in beautiful classical music to make it seem classy.

There is this one scene where Nino is singing his heart out, and the camera just slowly zooms in on Kathleen's face. She has this look that is half "I love art" and half "I want to eat this man alive." It goes on just a second too long and made me laugh out loud.

Some Great Singing, If You're Into That

We also get a random appearance by the legendary opera singer Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink. She plays herself, basically, and she has this incredibly warm grandmotherly vibe that feels like it belongs in a completely different movie.

When she and Nino sing together, the movie actually stops trying to be a silly soap opera for a second. It is genuinely nice, even if the plot completely grinds to a halt to let it happen.

The pacing in the second half gets really rushed, though. It feels like they realized they only had fifteen minutes left and needed to resolve a whole love triangle and a career crisis all at once.

Nino's girlfriend gets sad, there's some misunderstandings, and then suddenly everything is resolved with a big song. It's the kind of ending that makes you go, "Wait, that's it?" but in a charmingly dumb way. 😅

If you're looking for a deep story, skip this. But if you want to see some top-tier 1930s singing and some hilarious rich-people drama, it is a fun little relic.