User reviews

Made in 1929, this film was directed by Robert Mamoulian and features some pioneering camera work. Specifically, the static camera of other 1929 films is absent here. Mamoulian does some of this by shooting part of the picture silent with sound dubbed over it, such as in the scene where Kitty first arrives in New York and the camera follows her line of sight as she looks around the hustle and bustle of Grand Central Station. In scenes with lots of motion that have dialogue, Mamoulian has the players walking away from the camera so he can dub in the dialogue unsynchronized to the players' actual speech. If you didn't know how he did this, you wouldn't notice it.

If you are expecting to see Helen Morgan the torch singer doing the same type of act she did for Ziegfeld in his Follies, you'll be disappointed. Instead, be prepared to see Helen Morgan the actress in this one. Here Helen Morgan plays Kitty Darling, a woman of burlesque whose husband is sent to the electric chair for killing a man in a fit of jealousy. Kitty gives birth to their daughter, April, at about the same time. Convinced by a friend that the burlesque backstage is no place for a child to grow up, Kitty sends April to a convent school in Wisconsin. She remains there from age 5 to age 17.

When April returns home she finds her mother's world in sharp contrast to the peace of the convent. Plus, Kitty has taken up with a younger man. He is a parasite who is two and three timing her and soaking up what money she has. He tries to put the moves on April, but with no success. Kitty dealing with the end of her career and both her private and professional humiliation is hard to watch. Morgan gained weight and donned an unkempt blonde wig just for this part, and her acting is superb. Do realize that much of the film focuses on April, Kitty's daughter. Joan Peers was the actress playing April, and this was her first credited screen role. She handles the part quite well, but by 1931 her career in films was over.

By the way, the video quality is excellent and the audio is fine too if you are viewing the Kino DVD. It is necessary to turn up the volume a little during some outdoor or crowd scenes that have dialogue. However, there is no hissing and crackling in the audio, nor is the sound of shoes clomping around and jewelry clanging in competition with speech as in many other early sound films.

WOW what a terrific film..... 27-year-old Helen Morgan is superb as the frowzy Kitty Darling, the burlesque queen who sends her daughter away to convent school only to have her fall into the clutches of her villainous lover.

Rouben Mamoulian does a spectacular job directing this VERY early all-talkie. Amazing camera angles and lighting, silhouettes, overlapping dialog, songs, music.... he completely captures the sleazy stage world on stage and off.

The film is a pleasure from the very opening with the playbill blowing across the street to Kitty's tragic ending and then ironic kiss between the lovers in front of her poster.

Joan Peers is very good as the daughter, Henry Wadsworth is also good as the young sailor, and Fuller Mellish Jr. is one rotten villain.

The DVD came with "extras" (which I usually never watch) that gave great background material on Helen Morgan, the censorship of the film, and the search for 200-lb former burlesque queens to "round out" the "Beef Trust." But Helen Morgan is just great.... she has all the pathos of Julie from SHOW BOAT (she starred in the original Broadway production) with a twinge of Shelley Winters.... Great performance!

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?

This film's value is probably more as a peek into early sound motion pictures than for the story itself. The characters are interesting, and the plot is based on typical literary themes: family, money, and tradition. The scenes in the dance hall are bizarre, and in one flashback scene, Mamoulian shows techniques way ahead of his time in portraying a surreal dream-like sequence - complete with closeups and dissolves. The mother is brilliantly acted, and you will be left with some heartfelt sentiments at the end of the film. Most fun is looking for where the soundmen placed the microphones on the set. Pillows, clocks, and plants in every scene... hee hee.

I first half-watched this film on DVD while I was surfing the internet, never thinking it would be that good. Wrong. The next night I watched it again, no distractions. Helen Morgan drew me in with her soulful acting, Mamoulian had the camera man sweep in and out to highlight certain scenes and it just kept pulling me in. I watch a lot of film, mostly early film and this drama ranks up there with the best Mother-Daughter tragedies in the STELLA DALLAS style. But it is an original that has only been poorly copied since. I recommend you give this film your time and you too will be touched and amazed at the power of a very early talky. Like two other great films from 1929, LOVE PARADE & COCONUTS prove, some early sounds films are great not only standing the test of time… but they are great films for ALL TIME!

In this his first film, Rouben Mamoulian, unlike many of the directors in the early days of sound, was not afraid to try out innovative camera , sound, and editing techniques, some successful, most not quite right. Whereas most camera shots in 1929 films were static, housed within sound proof booths, Mamoulian was constantly moving his camera, shakily, bumpily, everywhere. He was also not afraid to copy the montage techniques of the Russians and the odd angles and lightning effects of German expressionism. He also captured, much more successfully, the tawdry world of cheap burlesque with its overweight and over-age chorus girls and awful comics. Helen Morgan is particularly believable, touching, as a second-rate performer dreaming of playing Broadway. A few years later, 1932, with a better screenplay and with the music of Rodgers & Hart, what does not quite come off here works magically in Mamoulian's best film, "Love Me Tonight" with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald.

Both in the theater and in movies, Rouben Mamoulian seems to have been present at the birth of several revolutions (talkies, the integrated stage musical, the populist opera "Porgy and Bess"); why isn't he revered as, say, Welles or Ford? This early talkie boasts remarkable use of camera and sound, interesting location shooting (though nominally made at Parmount's Astoria Studios, there is plenty of footage of 1929 New York), a hokey but touching mother-love story, much pre-Code sexual frankness, and Helen Morgan's finest hour on film. Consider it a companion piece to "Gypsy," and all the grittier for being made during the actual years of the waning of burlesque; in both movies, the mother forces the daughter into a tawdry stage career, but here the outcome is strikingly different. A fascinating curio for all the cinematic techniques that Mamoulian invented or perfected, and a most affecting melodrama in its own right.

Rouben Mamoulian established the possibilities the talkie, showing great flexibility in using location shots outdoors. A scene shot on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway just amazed me. Not the static feeling you expect from the first talkies at all. Helen Morgan gives a very moving performance as well, making the obsolete melodrama moving and in places quite modern in its way. With "Applause" and "Love Me Tonight" Mamoulian established the outline for the art of the talking picture.

Creaky antique shows it's age in many ways. Static shots, stiff performances by everyone but Morgan and a severely dated plot. What it does have in its favor is a good performance by Helen Morgan far more moving than anything else in the film and a real sense of the tawdriness of the lower burlesque route in its dying days. This is no slightly rundown theatre where the girls are immaculately dressed and styled even though they are working for peanuts in a grind-house such as it would appear to be the case once the code went into full effect throughout the 30's to the 50's. These dollies are over the hill washed up harridans with baggy stockings and cheap outfits. For that matter the cast is one of the least attractive and most common looking in memory. Helen Morgan is supposed to be frowsy and worn but the actress playing her daughter is plain and the actor playing her cheating husband is plain ugly, quite surprisingly he was only 29 here-he looks years older but perhaps he was in ill health since he died within two years at 31 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Considering its age and the transitional period movies were in at the time of its release not a bad film just very clunky.

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.

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.

Rouben Mamoulian once said that before making his first movie, APPLAUSE, he was interested in New York with all its beauty as well as its ugliness, in its variety of tastelessness, vulgarity and sorrows. Initially hired as the expert of dialogue, he broadened his Broadway experience in some most unpredictable fashion. Few members of the Astoria Studio at NYC as well as great Paramount pioneers could actually predict that he would contribute far more to the movie industry.

One of the earliest dialogue films which "at best can only be a poor substitute for the stage" (Paul Rotha) still appears to invite us to applaud APPLAUSE - a truly solid production of cinema's dawn. Much credit here to its cameraman George Folsey and the director Rouben Mamoulian, quite a newcomer at Hollywood in 1929, rightly described by Alexander Jacoby: "one of Hollywood's most fascinating marginal figures, a creative filmmaker ready to experiment with the possibilities of the new medium." The strength of his works lies primarily in visuals, moods, character development along with the insight into a person's place in society, but, foremost, a symphony of innovations, a "milestone in the development of sound film technique" (Audrey Kupferberg, Magill's Survey of Cinema, 1981).

While BECKY SHARP may boast experiment with color and DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE the use of the subjective camera in the unforgettable opening sequence, APPLAUSE offers an innovative (for the time but still attractive) use of a moving camera. George Folsey and Rouben Mamoulian's collaboration on that aspect aimed at absorbing viewers' senses and instill the understanding of the story. We cannot have such intense perceptive powers in movies nowadays. Images change with the places and the moods, the atmosphere is sometimes brought to the higher levels of perceptions and may beautifully influence a variety of feelings. There is also, or perhaps foremost, a great experiment with sound (consider the scene of a lullaby/prayer, some of the most cherished scene of the movie beautifully developed an aspect by Tom Milne). These innovations, as dated as they may seem now after almost 9 decades, hold a powerful impact due to one significant aspect. Alexander Jacoby rightly points out that "innovations are at the service of the movie's themes and feelings." Consider, for instance, the depiction of the beef trust and the performers, the moment they find out that Kitty Darling is pregnant (the camera is placed in such a way that we see Kitty actually being adored by her fellows and we see th scene from the bird's view. Mind you the sublime, almost mystical world of the convent with music, swans, silence, gestures, a depiction that inspired many movies to come, also those of religious themes. This 'collaboration' or 'combination' of technical and artistic innovations going well with the movie's feelings is also best executed in April-Tony's scenes, actually dates in New York City, the love scenes Lewis Jacobs (1939) labels as "exquisite and lyrical." But characters...let me highlight them in a separate paragraph because APPLAUSE would have been merely a display of director and cameraman's professional skills without any humanity if it were not for them.

Within the portrayal of characters, some viewers may find it truly surprising how fluid, how unclear the distinction between cinema and theater actually might be. Characters and psychology seem to correspond. Jacoby calls APPLAUSE "one of the most heartrending studies of human degradation." While many movie scholars admit Mamoulian's psychological over visual realism, the heroes of APPLAUSE really appear to applaud life with its drama, its joys, its love and aspirations. The most interesting are Kitty and her daughter April in their individualists and mutual dependence. Again, let me quote Jacoby when he mentions this "tragic exposition of mother love," something that movies exploited decades later with psychoanalytical attempts and thrill. Kitty is a declining star, panicking about oblivion, April is a young and naive girl who undergoes a shock from the blissful harmony of the convent world to the passionate carnality and temptations of the show business world. Both Helen Morgan and Joan Peers give unique performances and handle their roles with exceptional vitality, realism and conviction. Among male characters, Henry Wadsworth as flamboyant Tony, April's naive young counterpart, delivers something genuine. To the sweet question of his love "Are there many people in the world?" his seemingly silly but meaningful (when applied to the character study) answer "Only two as far as I am concerned" proves all romantic assumptions perfectly right.

Although people these days have access to many many more movies of similar content as well as possess a far richer film experience as both viewers and filmmakers, there is something powerful, even magical about this film that invites us to applaud Mamoulian's APPLAUSE with even greater enthusiasm. 9/10

This was a very interesting film to watch because of the year it was made-1929-when most talkies were limited in movement because of the way cameras of the time had to stay in certain places and microphones of the period had to be careful not to pick up unwanted noises of certain objects. How director Rouben Mamouliain attained his movements and sounds the way he wanted is a mystery to me but for the most part, he succeeded in making a naturalistic location-shot film that looked like it could have been made today with some underscoring and some clear smooth sounds added. Helen Morgan is suitably pathetic as the over-the-hill burlesque singer-dancer Kitty Darling who sends her only child April to a convent to shield her from her rough life. So after several years when her nearly-grown daughter (played by Joan Peers at this point) comes back, this April can't believe how sleazy a life her mother lives especially when this mother's comic boyfriend Hitch makes the moves on her! I'll stop there and just say this was quite a revelation to me what with not only the innovative techniques of the director but also with how the material was obviously presented before the Production Code of 1934 cleaned things up for the next few decades. Ms. Morgan's singing performances aren't bad, though she was better presented on film in Show Boat several years later. It's also a little harrowing knowing that she's one of the earliest of the popular female singers to fall victim to drugs and drink like latter-day contemporaries Judy Garland and Whitney Houston especially when you see her character's fate here. Still, Applause was enjoyable enough as both a historical and artistic film. P.S. As a Chicago native, I have to note the birth of Ms. Peers there also and Ms. Morgan's part-time raising there. Oh, and that my name is the same as the sailor April falls for here which tickled me since I knew a girl named April in elementary and high school that I had a huge massive crush on back in the day.

"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.

Forget for a moment that this was made in 1929 and logically shouldn't be this good. It's a thoroughly engaging gritty drama beautifully capturing the atmosphere of New York before even the Empire State Building was built. Helen Morgan, a big musical star of the 20s plays a fading star in the seediest of seedy vaudeville clubs. Her character, Kitty lives in a world of denial and tries her best to be oblivious to how terrible her life has become. The one glimmer of light in her life is her daughter in whom she vicariously invests all her love and hope for a life better than hers.

A similar story was used in STELLA DALLAS nearly a decade later but this a a much grittier, graphic, less sentimental and realistic rendition of that story. Even without that gooey sentimentality which spoils Barbara Stanwyck's film, this picture, with real, believable people engenders in you so much more emotion and pulls you deep into Kitty's murky quagmire. It's a world so real that it leaves a taste in your mouth hours after watching it. An excellent example of a movie being your own personal time machine

This film has two great assets. The first is Helen Morgan. She clearly drew inspiration for this role from her own life which sadly mirrored that of Kitty. There's a song by Genesis called 'Duchess' : ...And then there was the time that she performed, when nobody called for more... that kind of sums up the sad life not just of Kitty but of Helen Morgan herself. She gives one of the most natural and authentic performances you'll ever see in any 1930s pictures.

The other obvious superstar here is director Rouben Mamoulian. If you've watched any films from this era you might expect static camerawork, wooden acting and people just taking it turn slowly enunciating their lines whilst standing still in just one or two sets. This is the total opposite. I can confidently say that this is the only film you will ever watch from 1929 which you will enjoy as much as anything made years later. Incredibly, this was his first picture - he was an absolute genius. Unlike most directors who's response to the coming of sound was to forget how to make movies, Mamoulian embraced sound making it part of his rich tapestry. By 1929, many silent films had evolved into spectacular, sumptuous beautifully acted works of art. Sound turned most films into turgid stagey tedium but Mamoulian, being new to movies wasn't inhibited whatsoever by the arrival of the microphone. His film simply adds that extra layer of sound, voices, effects, even a musical score to a spectacularly impressive visual work of genius.

Although I can't stop gushing about how technically brilliant and (relatively) modern this picture is, don't just think it's interesting as academic study. It honestly is thoroughly entertaining. It's not just something to watch because it was made in 1929, you should watch this because it's a great film.

Films from the 20s may not be for everybody, some may find some of them static and creaky (those being stage to film adaptations also can be stagy) today. As for me, while there are some that are not great or even good and do not hold up there are plenty that are good (the best of Fritz Lang for example). 'Applause' is a very early talkie where films began to transition to silent to sound. Early talkies also varied in quality, some good, some not so good.

'Applause' luckily is one of the good ones. Would actually go as far to say that it is very good, if not quite great. It is one of the most emotional ones, its use of camera work being interesting and unique for back then and the use of sound was pretty much revolutionary. This was an example of early talkies that showed that the transition from silent to sound was working if not completely smoothly yet. Again it may not work for all, but for me and many others the appeal is very much understandable.

Can find very little to fault 'Applause' and the obvious starting point in praising it is Helen Morgan's performance. She is truly heart-rending here and gives her role sincerity and poignancy, making one root for her character every step of the way and relating to her throughout. All the rest of the cast are very good, especially Joan Peers, and the mother and daughter relationship is handled with honesty.

The story is hard-hitting, one of the very few early talkies that was not an easy watch emotionally, and very moving. Especially at the end, a contender for the most harrowing ending of all the early talkies and still had me in tears for a while after. Am going to agree with those that say that 'Applause' is an interesting film to look at and looks pretty good still.

Really liked that it didn't adopt the filmed play and cnfined look and went instead with a more imaginative, varied and kinetic approach not always seen in film at the time, this may have not been properly refined yet with it still being early days but it does impress and the effort was appreciated. The sets are far from limited and have atmosphere. Rueben Mamoulian directs imaginatively and the use of sound was creative and unlike what was seen before, am trying to not throw out the word revolutionary too much but that sums the sound up well. With it being one of the first to throw off any camerawork and microphone restrictions and instead mix atmospheric background noise and sound effects with the thoughtful dialogue.

Only some occasionally lagging pacing lets the side down.

Summarising, great early talkie and overall film. 9/10

Almost shocking in its closeness to the real backstage life, this film is like an early 'noir' with a documentary touch in its obvious ambition to unmask show-business and reveal the naked truth about its cynical inhumanity. A mother and a daughter make a heart-rending performance, as the mother wants to rescue her daughter from her own fate as a showgirl being driven to her human ruin by sending her to a convent - the contrast between the convent and the musical stage is the first startling eye-opener and marvellously effective - but from the very start of the film the director's (Mamoulian's)camera eye opens up the bare realism of stage life for the exploitation of girls. It's a masterpiece of its kind, like almost all Mamoulian's films - he is a highly creative director who in each film concentrated on something new and introduced innovations which then matured into standards - he was also guilty of the first Technicolor film. Here he is evidently influenced by Erich von Stroheim in the kind of dissecting realism that dominates the film, but Mamoulian never becomes rude, only shockingly observant.

It's strange when a movie feels both revolutionary and old-fashioned at once. APPLAUSE's storyline is very familiar to those that watch films of this vintage: a disreputable woman with a heart of gold (in this case, a burlesque queen) must save her respectable daughter from social ruin due to association with her. As far as that plot goes, this is a decent variation with no real surprises. The real genius of the film comes from Helen Morgan's beautiful performance and Rouben Mamoulian's groundbreaking visuals. This early talkie avoids the usual stapled to the ground, stagey technique commonly associated with this period of filmmaking. I would call it the first great sound film, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned.

Ask anyone with a cursory knowledge of classic cinema what the early talkies were like, and the chances are they will mention something about the lack of camera movement. Usually this is stated as if the static camera leads, ipso facto, to boring, static films. How ironic then that this all-talking backstager is spoiled by a camera that just won't sit still.

Applause was directed by Rouben Mamoulian, one of many theatre directors brought to Hollywood at the beginning of the sound era, and like many directors with a stage background (James Whale, George Cukor, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier) he was fascinated by the possibilities of cinema's mobile eye. Giving Mamoulian a camera was like giving a kid an expensive hi-tech toy, and he wouldn't let it go to waste in a soundproof booth. Instead, he has it swooping across rows of faces, dollying in and out of dialogue scenes or lodged up in the rafters.

This all gets remembered because it was unusual for the time, and therefore "clever". But what does it actually add? Sometimes, the camera moves seem to have some purpose, such as a dolly in on a significant object or a standard pull-back-and-reveal manoeuvre, but these are so wobbly and badly paced all they draw our attention to is the picture's artificiality. Other times the camera pans wildly all over the place for no apparent reason, reminding me of nothing more than a bad home movie. When the camera is still it is often at some daft high angle or pointing at the actors' legs, to no real advantage.

And it's not just the camera moves. Mamoulian is a shameless technique junkie, throwing in dissolves, screen wipes, layered sound, montages, giant shadows and anything else the technology of the day allowed. It's usually fairly clear why he uses each of these; in fact it's too clear, as every cinematic point is laboured to death, such as the over-the-top montage reflecting April's troubled mental state after she finds out what her mother does for a living. It would be more bearable if Mamoulian, like other directors who rely on exaggerated technique such as Michael Curtiz, FW Murnau and Alfred Hitchcock, at least knew some basic cinematic grammar, but he is a novice when it comes to screen storytelling. His dialogue scenes are blandly presentational – no close-ups, no rhyming angles, no thoughtful framing. All these things were by then established cinematic conventions, and they still are, for good reason; they bring human interaction to life on the screen.

Having said all that there are a few touches that do work. The all-round coverage of the dance hall at the beginning shows us both the backstage point-of-view and the diversity of the crowd, with the silhouettes of top-hatted pipe smokers in the balcony subtly pointing out that the burlesque gets some high-class customers as well. In the romantic café scene there is a subtle dolly out to reveal that the couple are now alone, but the moment is ruined by moving too quickly and clunkily to their exit. Helen Morgan's final scene makes effective use of background noise from the street outside, but again Mamoulian fails to hold the moment, instead following it with another wobbly shuffle of the camera and a meaningless high angle shot.

Of course, the whole point in bringing in theatre directors at this time was the notion that they would be the most capable in coaching actors with dialogue. There's no sign of this with Mamoulian. Helen Morgan's acting is just bad hamming (or "spamming" as I call it). She was at her most sensitive and emotive when singing, as her performance in the 1936 version of Showboat demonstrates, but she is underused as a singer in Applause. Fuller Mellish Jr is OK, but his cartoonish performance is wrong for this straight drama. The standout is Joan Peers, whose turn I would describe as average, the best anything can aspire to in Applause.

Mamoulian's champions tend to paint him as a failed genius in the style of von Stroheim and Welles, an artist whose artistry fell victim to studio straitjacketing. This is partly true – as time went by Mamoulian would be forced to rein in his technical excessiveness, and would learn to temper it with standard cinematic method. It's actually during this process that his pictures start to improve, and I'm even glad that he never totally lost his showy style, because he was occasionally even great in genres such as the musical or the swashbuckler, which require a bit of flamboyance behind the camera. Applause however is raw, uncultivated Mamoulian, fresh from the stage and wowed by movie-making gadgetry. Cinema may be the more technologically advanced medium, but like theatre the job of the director is to bring out the best in the actors and the story, not to smother them.

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.