Applause

"Applause" (1929), directed by Rouben Mamoulian (who did the great "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), is a corny but surprisingly effective musical about Kitty Darling, a burlesque showgirl who sends her young daughter April off to a convent to be raised properly. Now that April's a fully blossomed teenager, Kitty's disreputable boyfriend Hitch lusts after the possibility of getting her into the burlesque business and demands that Kitty stop sending money to the convent. April comes back to New York City and is shocked to see where her mother works. However she cannot deny that she loves her mother or that her mother's burlesque money supported her in the convent. April struggles against Hitch's wishes and finally gives in and becomes a showgirl. One night she meets a nice sailor on leave named Tony. They fall in love and Tony proposes marriage and a nice life on a farm back in Wisconsin. At the same time, Kitty loses her job--she's just too old to perform anymore. What will happen? Will it all turn out for the good in the end? "Applause" is important in that it is one of the first great American musicals.

Interestingly, I've always been told that "Gone with the Wind" was the taboo-breaking picture that first transgressed the profanity barrier, but our villain Hitch says "damn" twice in this film, not to mention the surprisingly overt sexuality of the burlesque house.

One of the greatest of the early talkies Applause was also the debut feature of Rouben Mamoulian, whose later successes include the celebrated Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1931) starring Frederic March, one of Garbo's finest vehicles Queen Christina (1933), as well as the groundbreaking Technicolor production Becky Sharp (1935). Lured into cinema after great success in theatre, like Welles later on Mamoulian found out how to make films in a crash course partly of his own devising: by absorbing the process at studios in New York, resolutely watching the work of others until he "learned what not to do." Hired ostensibly as a stage expert on dialogue to help make the most of the new sound medium, Mamoulian, again like the future Welles, quickly proved himself an all-round innovator, looking at production with fresh eyes with an ability to reinvent aspects of cinema as he found them. "All I could think of was the marvellous things one could do with the camera and the exciting new potentials of sound recording," he said.

Applause was the result - a film which still astonishes us today, let alone those who saw it for the first time 80 years ago when sound had made considerable attack on the creative freedom previously taken for granted by silent films.

Mamoulian's choice of subject matter for his first feature initially seemed to promise little that was striking: a somewhat hoary old novel about a fading burlesque queen sacrificing herself for her daughter, which promised much melodramatic moralising. But the fledgling director was to prove not so much interested in the story as in the way he could find of telling it, invigorating the material.

Mamoulian's practical experience of film-making was gained largely by sitting on the sidelines at Paramount's New York studios. His theoretical inspiration may one suspects, but cannot prove, have been inspired elsewhere: notably the expressive use of fluid cinematography shown in Murnau's great American opus Sunrise, made and released to huge industry interest just a few short years before. Indeed, Mamoulian was later to use the great German's director of photography when he later came to make Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. In Applause we find moments of expressionism mingled with lyricism with which the German would find himself at home. Like Murnau, Mamoulian too set out to tell his story primarily through the movement of his camera, adding to this some striking location work. The earlier director was not constrained by the mechanics of soundtrack; where Mamoulian took a step forward was in the way he insisted that few of the limitations of the new format since then were necessary, a fact shown by the fact many of his experiments in Applause have become common film language.

This approach becomes apparent right from the opening scene, where the thought is more more in terms of travel than of sound: first a few shots of a closed shop front, then a track along a newspaper-blown street. A small dog is rescued from the litter by a girl, before a brass band introduces her and us to the arrival of the burlesque queen, Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan), and her progress in an open carriage. The film cuts to inside her theatre, tracks steadily past musicians in the pit, pans back and forth over the dancing bodies on stage before finally resting on the tired faces of the chorus girls. Mamoulian's concern with the "delight of movement" as he put it, is everywhere. Such concerns brought technical considerations for the sound men that were at first considered impossible. One later scene in particular brought on a significant crisis, where Kitty sings a burlesque song to her daughter by way of lullaby as the child simultaneously whispers her prayers (this in a long single take). The primitive microphone picked up one and not the other, so the director suggested using two mics, and mixing it together later. From such guileless innovations are revolutions made; after some strenuous initial doubts, the studio heads gave Mamoulian carte blanche to continue the film just as he sought fit.

Applause is one of those movies where virtually every scene demands attention for the interested viewer, either by virtue of Mamoulian's skill or, in the case of Helen Morgan, through an especially moving performance. The director had filled his cast with those who were as new to the medium of film as he was. Some, like Fuller Mellish, playing the city slicker, as well as Jack Cameron (Kitty's predacious beau) overplay slightly in that 1930s wiseacre fashion distracting to modern taste - one of the film's few weaknesses - but Morgan's pathetic dignity more than compensates for this and edges the melodrama onward into tragedy. Even the doomed, blossoming romance between Kitty's daughter April (Joan Peters) and her sailor, although somewhat hackneyed in expression, becomes acceptable in the hands of such a sensitive director who to their scenes together, as critic Tom Milne noted, "brings a simple lyricism which is neither faux nor naïf". A particularly fine moment is provided by the lovers' subway platform farewell shot, again in long take. The two have been forced apart by ironic circumstance but he does not know why. April's lover has little say in his despondency but, almost absent-mindedly, buys and pushes a cheap packet of gum from a machine into her hand as a leaving present. Another director would have made this pathetic action trite; Mamoulian makes it say everything there is to say about a closing relationship between two people, where something so slight can be so precious.

It would have been too easy to produce a first work that showed off for its own account. But Applause remains so compulsive because it succeeds both as an empathetic story of people and as a technical tour-de-force, without one overbalancing the other. It is also exhilarating as it shows how imagination and creative determination liberated film even at this early stage, from self-imposed limitations.

Applause is without a doubt the best early talkie I have ever seen. The inventive camera angles, the location shots (the Brooklyn Bridge!), the more realistic acting style, and even some pre-Busby Berkeley overhead shots of dancing girls put this film in the 'ahead-of-its-time' league.

Technical achievements aside, I recommend this film to anyone interested in early 1930s culture, backstage drama, hard-boiled slang, or New York City circa 1929 -- it's a great slice of history. Just seeing the Gothic Woolworth building when it was still the tallest structure in the world or hearing Tony's reaction to meeting a girl named April (an unusual name at the time) is a priceless history lesson in itself.

Even if you aren't interested in any of those elements, it's a touching, timeless, well-told story ... and it's available now on DVD. What more could you want?

I know of two films that, comparatively speaking always, rival Kane (before Kane) in their bevy of diverse film technique, both French. Now a third one and the first in sound. Similar to Welles, Mamoulian started out in the theater and moved to film, and like him, an innovator, loved the camera, visual space and movement, and fought with studios on and off throughout his uneven career.

No comparison really. Welles was a narrative mastermind next to his other qualities as a showman. Still, an interesting guy I will be seeing more from—already have Love Me Tonight, a light operetta in the Lubitsch mode.

The plot here is shameless melodrama, a burlesque mother is made by her abusive boyfriend to pull her daughter from boarding school and into the show biz to start making money. The boyfriend is the kind of lecherous villain that audiences back when they thought the actor was his character, would probably boo his every on-screen appearance. In the silent format, the effect would have been somewhat mitigated by the presence of intertitles, and not being able to hear the constant sobs and wails of pathetic anguish of the mother—theatrical voicing on top of theatrical acting.

But no matter. Watch a few films of the era and get back to this, start with The Jazz Singer.

It's a breath of fresh air. The staging is fluid; the places some of them real, explored with a youthful, modern gaze; the camera expressive, cultivating visual space as of equal importance to the story than as simple conveyance for it. I would describe it, relative to its time, as New Wave—think of Breathless by contrast to a late 50's run-of-the-mill crime flick.

The scene of two youthful lovers staring out to sea on top of I think the Empire State Building takes the breath away. Or the two of them wandering by sunup to Brooklyn Bridge—simple poetry, a pan from wrought iron framework to simmering horizon, still modern.

Ultimately, it exhilarates. You dwell long enough in the stringent melodrama and overall depressing feel of the burlesque world, so these free flows, when they come, sweep you out to sea and floating freedom.

It's a smart bit of dynamics. You venture past the limits of the adult stage with these youth (she a dancer, he a sailor), it's got to be you. When they part in the subway, and she looks with a kind of dumb amazement at the pieces of gum in her palm, it's a heartbreaking moment.

Well, it wasn't going to fly. It opened with three weeks to go for Black Tuesday.

Mamoulian's brilliance has been noted here and elsewhere - and properly so. But it should not obscure the poignant, sensitive and altogether touching performance of Helen Morgan. Best known for her singing, Morgan revealed in a number of films that she was a better actress than she was a singer. Here, as in "Show Boat" and "Go Into Your Dance," among others, she plays a woman whom life has mishandled: not quite reputable, doing what she must to hold her life together, seemingly tough on the outside but vulnerable to the wrong kind of man. If her best performances were of a type, she wasn't the first performer to achieve success by doing one thing well.

While it's doubtful if anyone would remember this picture if not for Mamoulian's creativity, Helen Morgan's marvelous contribution should not be overlooked.