Amame o déjame

Doris Day plays Ruth Etting, torch singer of the twenties and thirties, in this glossy MGM biopic. Several key songs from Etting's career are covered, sung well by Day (specifically Ten Cents a Dance, You Made Me Love You, and Love Me or Leave Me).

Although Day is effective in the role and looks a treat, the best acting performance in the movie comes from James Cagney as Marty ‘The Gimp' Snyder, Etting's manager and husband. Cameron Mitchell plays Johnny the loyal piano player who waits for Etting to find her own way, while Robert Keith is good as Barney, close friend to both Snyder and his wife.

Good Technicolor and a Cinemascope treatment makes the movie look good, and the arrangements are excellent. Day is nothing like the real Ruth Etting either in looks or voice, but she does well in one of her last great musical roles.

Brilliant engaging from start to finish. Every scene with Cagney and Day is compelling. All the songs are great, and Doris Day's sing of the jazzy numbers is outstanding. One that can be watched over and over again.

Doris Day portrays singing great Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," a 1955 film costarring James Cagney and Cameron Mitchell.

The film tells the story, somewhat fictionalized, of Etting's rise to fame in the 1920s and her association and marriage to Marty "The Gimp" Snyder, a Chicago gangster.

In the story, Etting is highly ambitious, and Marty helps her career after picking her up in a dance hall and realizing he's not going to get anywhere. He's hoping for the big prize - i.e., Ruth - at the end of the rainbow, but though she's grateful, she's never going to be THAT grateful.

Finally, he becomes so angry that he rapes her (this is suggested in the film but the scene was cut by the censors). She marries him, though she's in love with a pianist, Marty Alderman.

This film was made about five years before Ross Hunter glamorized Doris and made her the #1 box office star in a series of comedies, three of which were with Rock Hudson. Before that, she was a pretty woman with a sweet, smooth voice and sturdy acting ability. And nowhere does she demonstrate all three qualities as she does here. And throw in a sensational figure in some stunning gowns to boot.

Doris' Ruth is a young woman who looks and acts like sugar but has the determination of steel underneath. She speaks softly but has the glint of ambition in her eye. Day's voice and style are nothing like Etting's, but the producers and director weren't looking for an imitation.

Doris looks and sounds fantastic, singing a huge amount of music, including "Ten Cents a Dance," the title song, "Chasing the Blues Away" and many others.

Cagney gives an extremely powerful performance as Marty, a pushy little man with a huge insecurity and a passion for Ruth. It is a fully fleshed out portrayal of an abusive, possessive man that you can hate and pity at the same time.

Cagney deservedly won an Oscar nomination for the role of Marty. He and Doris' contrasting acting styles mesh beautifully as well.

Though there were liberties taken with the Etting story, if you read her bio, it sounds just like the film. Did the movie have a '20s and the '30s feel to it? Not really. But it doesn't matter. The film is in color and has a rich look, and what a score. What actors. A must see.

I am NOT a fan of Doris Day - there is just something about her that annoys me. But in this movie she acted very different from the usual Doris Day movie. And the way she sang those ballads breaks your heart. But the acting job that truly amazes - and has through the years made me a fan - is that of James Cagney. One wonders if he had a parent that was abusive or an Uncle or someone he had intimately observed. Because from somewhere that man understood something about an abusive relationship and put it in his performance. It was positively beyond extraordinary. He deserved an Academy Nomination at the very least. While he was cruel, vile, despicable, certainly repulsive and yet you felt at the same time he was pitiful, sad, pathetic. It was an extremely complex performance. When I saw "Love Me Or Leave Me" as a teenager I didn't appreciate the subtlety of his acting. It wasn't until I saw it many, many years later and had gone through a lot of living that I comprehended the true magnitude of his performance.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s musicals acquired a distinctly noir-ish quality, and the life of singer Ruth Etting was made to order.

Born in 1896, Etting was a hardknocks chorus girl when she caught the eye of small-time Chicago hood Martin "Moe the Gimp" Snyder, who married her in 1922 and proceeded to promote her career--occasionally, according to rumor, at gun point. By 1927 Etting was a popular singer and a major Broadway star, and when talkies arrived the couple moved to California, where Etting became a favorite for the musical shorts that were then in vogue. But the marriage was volatile, and when Snyder found Etting was having an affair with pianist Myrl Alderman, Snyder shot him. Alderman survived and Etting wasted little time in divorcing Snyder and marrying Alderman, but the scandal was so shocking that it effectively ended her career. She died, largely forgotten, 1978.

As you might expect, LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME plays fast and loose with the facts, presenting Etting as an innocent (she wasn't) and Snyder as a major crime figure (he wasn't); even so, it does seem to capture something elemental about both the era and the characters. Much of this is due to the on-screen chemistry between leads Doris Day and Jimmy Cagney, who spark and sizzle in a truly surprising way.

It will not surprise viewers that Cagney plays Snyder extremely well; he is, after all, best recalled for his numerous crime-drama roles. But it may surprise viewers that Day had the acting chops to match him. Today she is most widely remembered as a master of light comedy, but in truth Doris Day's films of the 1940s and 1950s were more often hard drama than fly-weight amusements, including such heavy-hitters as YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN, STORM WARNING, and YOUNG AT HEART; she would continue her string of dramatic roles in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Her performance in LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME is often considered her high-water mark as a dramatic actress: she gives it everything she's got, and the sparks really fly when she and Cagney square off.

The look of the film, which was directed by Charles Vidor and sports art direction by the legendary Cedrick Gibbons, is beautiful, and the film moves at a smart clip; its one failing is that censorship issues of the era left several scenes--including a legendary rape sequence--on the cutting room floor. The music, drawn from Etting's most famous recordings, is also memorable, and Day pulls out all the stops for her songs. The DVD is not flawless, but you'll never notice it, and it includes several bonuses, two of which show us the real Ruth Etting. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer