Maytime: A Beautiful, Stuffy Time Capsule

Is it worth your time?

If you like your movies dripping with 1930s studio polish and you don’t mind a bit of operatic melodrama, you’ll probably find Maytime charming. It is the kind of film where everyone wears fancy hats and the stakes are mostly about whether two people can sing a duet without crying. If you prefer your cinema grounded or just find old-school MGM musicals a bit too sugary, this will feel like a chore.

Honestly, the whole movie is just an excuse to let Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sing at each other. They do it well, sure, but there’s a persistent feeling that the plot is just waiting for the next musical cue so it can stop bothering with dialogue.

John Barrymore shows up as the vocal teacher, and he is doing some heavy lifting. He brings this weird, frantic energy that honestly made me lean in closer whenever he was on screen. It’s almost like he knew the movie needed a pulse.

The Rhythm of the thing

The pacing is… well, it’s very 1937. It takes its sweet time getting to the point. There’s a sequence in the middle that drags so much I found myself counting the buttons on MacDonald’s dress. It just goes on.

But then, there’s this one moment where the singing stops and they just look at each other. It’s quiet. It’s actually kind of sad, in a way that surprised me. It reminded me a bit of the quiet melancholy you see in The Colleen Bawn, though the tone here is obviously much more polished and expensive.

• The sets are huge. Like, distractingly huge.
• The makeup on the aging characters is a bit rough around the edges, if you look close.
• Nelson Eddy has a jawline that could cut glass. It’s almost distracting.

It’s not as manic or weirdly funny as something like The Pups' Picnic, obviously. It takes itself very seriously. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it just makes the dialogue sound like it was written by someone who had never actually spoken to another human being.

I left the movie feeling like I had just eaten a box of fancy chocolates. It’s sweet, it’s pretty to look at, but I’m not sure I’ll be thinking about it next week. Maybe that’s fine. Not every movie needs to change your life, right?

Just don't go in expecting a gritty drama. This is pure, unadulterated studio fluff, but at least it’s high-quality fluff. Also, keep an eye on the background extras during the opera scenes; half of them are just pretending to play violins and it’s genuinely funny if you stare for more than five seconds.