General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Love Me or Leave Me

Love Me or Leave Me is a 1955 American biographical musical drama directed by Charles Vidor for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Doris Day as the torch singer Ruth Etting and James Cagney as the Chicago gangster Martin "Moe the Gimp" Snyder, who promoted and married her. Produced by Joe Pasternak from a screenplay by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart, it dramatizes Etting's rise from a ten-cents-a-dance job in 1920s Chicago to Broadway stardom under the control of a possessive manager.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	10 June 1955 (wide); world premiere in Dallas, Texas, 26 May 1955¹
Format	122 minutes, CinemaScope, Eastman Color, Western Electric sound¹
Principal cast	Doris Day (Ruth Etting), James Cagney (Martin Snyder), Cameron Mitchell (Johnny Alderman)¹
Academy Awards	Won Best Motion Picture Story (Daniel Fuchs); nominated for Best Actor (Cagney), Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording, Best Song ("I'll Never Stop Loving You"), and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture¹
Career firsts	First MGM film for both Day and Cagney; arranger Percy Faith's first screen assignment; first time Cagney lacked top billing since A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)¹
Working titles	Singin' the Blues and The Ruth Etting Story¹
Production dates	Early December 1954 to mid-February 1955¹

Spoilers

Story and cast

The film opens in a Chicago dance club in the 1920s, where small-time gangster Martin Snyder, who runs a laundry service and protection racket, encounters the taxi dancer (woman paid a few cents per dance with customers) Ruth Etting after she kicks an abusive customer and is fired. Snyder, a hot-tempered bully with connections throughout Chicago, offers to advance her career, and she accepts. Under his management she sings in clubs, stars on her own radio program, and wins a contract with the Ziegfeld Follies in New York; afraid of losing control of her to the Follies professionals, Snyder pulls her out. As her fame grows, his obsessive and controlling behavior threatens her success and happiness, and the marriage she enters becomes a life of fear and violence.¹^•³^•⁴

Cameron Mitchell plays pianist and arranger Johnny Alderman, the character based on Myrl Alderman, the musician Etting loved; in the film's climax Snyder, suspicious of Ruth's feelings for Johnny, shoots him and is arrested.¹^•³ The supporting cast includes Robert Keith as Etting's agent Bernard V. Loomis, Tom Tully as Frobisher, and Harry Bellaver as Snyder's right-hand man Georgie.¹

Casting and production

Cagney, already cast as the male lead, recommended Day to producer Joe Pasternak for the Etting role after her seven-year Warner Brothers contract ended, and ceded top billing to her, only the second time since 1931 that he had accepted less than top billing. Day was the top female recording artist in the United States in 1955, and the film was her first project after leaving Warner Brothers, where she had made 17 pictures, usually as the cheerful girl-next-door.³^•² The studio had originally considered George Cukor as director with Ava Gardner as Etting, until Cagney convinced Pasternak that Day was the right choice.²^•⁵

Day prepared by listening to Etting's records and obtaining 112 sides of songs Etting had recorded, from which the film's numbers were selected; she had a $40,000 wardrobe designed by Helen Rose and, during the first seven weeks of shooting, only one half day off.³ In her autobiography Doris Day: Her Own Story, Day described a scene in which Snyder attacks and rapes Ruth that was largely cut by the censors; she learned how much had been removed only when she saw the released film.²

The real Ruth Etting

Ruth Etting (1896–1978) was a singing star of stage, radio, and recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, with over 60 hit recordings and signature tunes including "Shine On Harvest Moon," "Ten Cents a Dance," and "Love Me or Leave Me."⁶ She starred in the Ziegfeld Follies from 1927 to 1931 and introduced the song "Love Me or Leave Me" in the 1928 Broadway musical comedy Whoopee, written by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn.⁷ She married Snyder in the early 1920s and divorced him in 1937; in 1938 Snyder shot and injured her pianist Myrl Alderman, whom she then married. The scandal of the trial effectively ended her career.⁶^•⁸

The film took liberties with this record. Etting herself objected that she had never been a dancehall girl, saying the device existed only to work in "Ten Cents a Dance," and that "they took a lot of liberties with my life."² The film shows her marrying Snyder during her run with the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927, while the couple had in fact married in 1922.⁹ Etting, Snyder, and Alderman were all still alive when the film was made, and all three received undisclosed payments from MGM for the rights to their stories.¹ In March 1957 Etting brought a one million dollar libel suit against the Hearst Corporation, publisher of Cosmopolitan, over an April 1956 article describing her as "a famous girl singer of the twenties who fell in love with a bad man, became an alcoholic, and inspired a murder"; the outcome of the suit was not determined in the record.¹

Music

The film's twelve complete musical numbers were almost all Etting hits, with two new songs written for the picture: "I'll Never Stop Loving You" (music by Nicholas Brodszky, lyrics by Sammy Cahn) and "Never Look Back" (music and lyrics by Chilton Price).¹⁰^•¹ The standards performed by Day include "Ten Cents a Dance" (Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart), "You Made Me Love You" (James V. Monaco and Joe McCarthy), "Mean to Me," "Shaking the Blues Away" (Irving Berlin), "At Sundown," and the title song.¹ Percy Faith arranged and conducted Day's songs in his first screen assignment, with George Stoll as music supervisor.¹ Both new songs became substantial hits for Day, "I'll Never Stop Loving You" earning an Oscar nomination for Best Song, and the soundtrack album was the recording industry's best seller of the year.³

Reception and legacy

The film was a critical and commercial success, earning six Academy Award nominations and winning for Best Motion Picture Story.¹^•³ Day received almost unanimous critical praise but was not among the five Best Actress nominees that year; Cagney earned a Best Actor nomination, his third, and after his retirement cited the film as one of the five best of his career.³ A contemporary New Yorker review by John McCarten noted that Cagney "does a neat job of caricaturing the sort of hoodlum he used to specialize in," while finding the later villainy monotonous.¹¹ Later assessments have treated the film as a departure from the conventional musical, focusing on love, fear, and tragedy, and as one of Day's finest dramatic performances.¹²^•¹³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 75% Tomatometer from 8 reviews and a 75% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁴

TCM's Roger Fristoe observed a final irony: the Snyder–Etting relationship had parallels to Day's marriage to her third husband, Martin Melcher, who controlled her business affairs and, when he died in 1968, was found to have mismanaged her savings of $20 million, leaving her broke.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026