Applause (1929)

I'm long overdue with the post -- partially because life is busy, and I am lazy.

Another factor, however, came from deciding what to write about. After writing about a drama like The Animal Kingdom, I wanted to explore something more thematically outrageous, such as a horror movie. But Applause wanted to be written about, despite being a melodrama with a formulaic plot. Of course, the shooting style and visual elements are not formulaic at all. In fact, this movie is downright weird at times.

Stop looking at me like that, Helen Morgan. You know it's true.

What is it about Applause that stuck with me? Part of it is Helen Morgan's over-the-top performance. Another aspect is the explicit sexual politics of the film, particularly the power dynamics of the gaze (male or otherwise). Part of it is the way that the director, Rouben Mamoulian, composed shots in ways I didn't expect from a 1929 film.

But really, I was simply flabbergasted in the first ten minutes of the movie, when Kitty has just given birth backstage during a burlesque performance. There's a close-up of her tearstained face; she slowly opens her eyes to look directly into the camera. It's uncanny and intimate.

Shortly thereafter, the frumpy chorines awkwardly file into her dressing room to congratulate the new mother. The scene is shot from above, and then abruptly transitions to a shot from the baby's perspective. I didn't know much about the movie when I checked it out from the library, and I wasn't expecting anything particularly "arty" at first.

Do chorus lines always move in single file?

Yikes. That's a lot to take in on your first day.

The plot

The story is familiar: stage performer Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan) decides to send her young daughter to boarding school to shield her from the sordidness of theater life. Years later, when Kitty's loathsome new boyfriend insists that Kitty is spending too much money on school, 17 year-old April (Joan Peers) joins her mother in New York. Convent-educated April is horrified by Kitty's theatrical career, which has declined over time to a rather sleazy burlesque show. The boyfriend, Hitch (Fuller Mellish, Jr.)  is an unfaithful gold-digger who promptly begins harassing April with unwelcome pawing and innuendo.

Meanwhile, April meets a young sailor, Tony (Henry Wadsworth); they fall in love and plan to get married. But when April overhears Hitch abusing Kitty, she decides that her duty is to protect and support her mother. Panicked at the thought of April leaving Tony, Kitty overdoses on sleeping pills in order to free her daughter from the burlesque life. At the theater, everyone assumes that Kitty is merely too drunk to perform, so April agrees to perform the striptease number in her stead. Of course, she breaks down in tears part-way through, and rushes off stage into Tony's arms. They agree to marry after all, and plan to bring mama Kitty to live with them in Wisconsin -- not yet knowing that Kitty is dead in the dressing room. Dun-dun-duhhhhhn!

Helen Morgan

But even though this movie hits the familiar plot points of motherly love and sacrifice, daughterly love and sacrifice, and the sacrifices we make for the love of showbiz, Applause still manages to surprise. A big part of the fascination comes from watching Helen Morgan as Kitty Darling. She acts -- and overacts -- the hell out of this role. She sheds her usual glamour and allows herself to be frumpy, tender, sordid, pitiable, and passionate. If you remember old Merrie Melodies cartoons, you may be familiar with Helen Morgan without even knowing it. She makes an appearance in the Hollywood spoof cartoon "CooCoo Nut Grove" as the torch singer who floods the nightclub with tears.

Audiences who bought tickets to Applause expected to see this glamorous dame:

But the Helen Morgan they got was this:

Helen Morgan died in 1941 from cirrhosis of the liver, and there's a poignancy to her portrayal of a needy, alcoholic performer. There's also a rumor that she gave a child up for adoption in 1926, which adds another layer for those looking to psychoanalyze her performance. [I would never.]

Religion, morality, and burlesque

Applause has an interesting religious bent, alternately criticizing and sympathizing with the world of burlesque. When Kitty sends April to a Catholic convent school, the moment is marked by a dissolve shot between April playing dress up with her mother and accepting a set of rosary beads from a nun.

There's a brief (and boring) choral interlude at the convent school, which is idealized as a haven of purity and simplicity.

Well, this isn't heavy-handed at all.

April's first view of her Kitty's burlesque act is traumatic, since she hasn't seen her mother perform in several years. Mamoulian does an interesting job of portraying the experience from April's perspective. Unglamorous shots of the dancers are interspersed with close-ups of the equally grotesque male audience, finally dissolving to April's miserable face.

Be thankful that I couldn't include all the faces from this sequence, particularly the ones with metal teeth. Nightmare fuel.

The director manages to make the spectacle of burlesque as unappealing as possible. In an interview published in the cinema magazine The Velvet Light Trap (1982), Mamoulian said, "As a preliminary education, I went to all the burlesque houses — the story revolved around burlesque in New York. Frankly, it made me sick in the stomach, this kind of titillation. The audiences were ugly. The girls were bored. The whole thing was tawdry, shoddy, unworthy of a human being, woman or man."

As ugly as the sequence of audience and performer is, the power dynamics are at least partially weighted in favor of the dancers' favor. Although the male audience members are consumers of the sexual spectacle, the camera angles down onto their upturned faces -- they are not "on top." The dancers are objectified, but are nonetheless more than an assemblage of body parts; they gaze directly at the viewer(s), and appear to be reveling in the performance itself. But the grotesquerie undercuts any glimmer of empowerment. More than anything, both sides seem to be in thrall to a circle of desiring and being desired.

Despite this disturbing depiction of the sexual politics of the striptease, Applause is gentle on the dancers themselves. Later that evening, when April is upset after her experience in the theater, Kitty soothes her:

It ain't what you do so much as what ya are. That's it -- it's what you are. Why, there's a coupla dames in this troupe who are as good Catholics as you'd expect to see, even if they do make their living shaking. I ain't ashamed of it, and you shouldn't be ashamed of me neither.

[The word "Catholic" in this speech was removed by censors, and the print on the Kino DVD I watched retains this omission.]

As a long-time burlesque star, Kitty is used to having some degree of power. It's a devastating moment when she realizes that reputation and experience do not trump physical beauty. In the world of performance, especially burlesque, men are still the arbiters of female sexual worth. The shot of the promoter who rejects her summarizes this dynamic in a well-composed shot.

Lovely legs loom large for this louse.

Applause isn't coy about the fact that Kitty and Hitch are having sex outside of marriage, or that Hitch is sleeping around behind her back. In fact, Kitty's decision to marry Hitch is shown as a terrible idea, even though it is the "moral" thing to do.

At the same time, April is shielded from any taint of illicit sex, both in her relationship with Tony, and in her parentage. Kitty is married to April's father, who is referenced only briefly at the beginning of the film, via a telegram announcing his imminent execution for an unspecified crime.

Contemporary critics were divided on the merits of Applause. Many acknowledged the innovative camera work and Helen Morgan's performance, but called the story "sordid" and "dubious stuff for general audiences." People looking for a lighthearted musical to distract them from the recent stock market crash were not cheered by a film in which "a melancholy undercurrent runs through the picture and makes it heavy stuff." (Film Daily)

Scene framing and emotional distance

Applause was Rouben Mamoulian's first film. He had recently had great success staging Porgy on Broadway, and his work on this first film incorporates aspects of the live theater experience. This early shot is as much about sitting in an actual theater as it is about the performance itself:

Smoking pipes in the cheap seats.

Mamoulian composed scenes in distracting ways, creating an enforced distance between the film audience and the action of the story. Not unlike Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect), Mamoulian reminds us that we are watching a movie. Critics and audiences complained the the camerawork was a distraction because it kept them from getting lost in the experience of artificial realism.

Applause resists viewer immersion in the action. Over and over again, Mamoulian frames shots so that both the characters and the audience are looking through something at the focus of attention: backstage rigging, curtains, a skyscraper railing, a subway platform, or legs:

That's quite a hair bow.

This is the least depressing view of the burlesque show we see.

You can see a stagehand appreciating the performance on the right.

New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.

We watch a man watch April watch Tony's train pull away, while the conductor looks out the window at all of us.

If Hitch is staring at their legs while we look their legs through his legs, who is the voyeur here?

The character of Hitch, in particular, is associated with looking as an act of power and voyeuristic authority. His scenes with Kitty are far from subtle when it comes to power differentials.

Watch who you're pointing at there, mister.

No, really, look. Hitch is pointing. His shadow is pointing. His portrait is leering at both Kitty and her photos. There are too many people in this image of two characters.

Camera movement

One of the reasons that Mamoulian and Applause are remembered today is the innovative use of camera movement and sound. When talking films began, the technical requirements of recording sound meant that a lot of visual vitality was sacrificed. Shots became more static in order to accommodate bulky recording equipment and cameras in soundproofed booths. (Wikipedia has a brief summary for you technical geeks).

Mamoulian had the cameras mounted on pneumatic tires, allowing him to compose dynamic shots with relatively little cutting. A pre-release article in The Hollywood Filmographer describes the first day of shooting Applause, in which Mamoulian tackled a complex scene. Under the headline "Youthful Genius Creates Sensation With Camera," the writer gushes:

[The scene] opened with a closeup of Miss Peers lying in bed with a street slight shining intermittently through her bedroom window. Then the camera moved back until it picked up Miss Morgan, who was crooning a melody in an effort to get her little girl to sleep.... The camera moved swiftly into the scene, picking up the two in closeup as the poured forth their thoughts and clung to each other in desperate love. Back again went the camera until it picked up on the wall the shadow of Fuller Melish, Jr., as he stood in the bedroom doorway, demanding a drink. Miss Morgan dashed to him and pushed him into another room as the camera moved again, back into the scene to show the little girl lying in a fitful sleep on the bed while the light from the street sign again played upon her drawn face.

While a silent film shot could have moved as nimbly, such scenes would need to be broken to add in dialogue intertitles. Thus, Mamoulian's uninterrupted shots were a novelty -- one which would come to suffer from overuse, according to some critics.

In 1932, the American Society of Cinematographers called a meeting to discuss the overuse of "trucking" shots, as reported in the August 1932 edition of American Cinematographer magazine. Some film examples were shown (although sadly unidentified in the article) that were "so absurd as to positively spoil the picture." Mamoulian was called to account in person for starting the fad, at which point he recommended restraint and a positive artistic vision. "Moving shots for the sake of moving shots and with no reason are silly. But I believe that by taking the camera from the tripod we can, in many instances, add power and punch to the scene."

Final thoughts and random potpourri

Applause is not always a comfortable movie to watch, but it's fascinating. I dug further than usual into primary sources and camera geekery while exploring Applause. I could have delved even more (I didn't even touch the innovative use of outdoor shots), but I practically turned this into a term paper as it is. I may need to start scaling back on the scope of these posts.

• If you aren't familiar with Lantern media search, I highly recommend it. It's a fantastic way to leaf through old movie magazines online, and allows you to explore obscure research tangents.

• Applause contains the most touching closeup of Wrigley's gum ever. Tony buys some for April out of an automat before they part ways, presumably forever.

I got kind of teary.

• There are SO MANY examples of Hitch being a terrible person, and of Helen Morgan breaking my heart.

Split screen heartbreak.

So much pointing.

As April says, "Horrible men staring at you, saying awful things."

Hitch actually tells April, "Maybe a good mauling would do you good for a change."

Oh, Kitty Darling.

Helen Morgan does not die half-way. This is some dedicated expiration.

*slow clap* for Applause

The Animal Kingdom (1932)

[This post gets a bit long, what with all the plot summary. But what are the chances you're going to watch the whole thing for yourself, unless you're a pre-code geek or have a weakness for love triangles?]

The Animal Kingdom is an adaptation of the play by Phillip Barry, who also wrote the better-known Philadelphia Story and Holiday. Once again, it's the story of well-to-do people trying to juggle wealth, integrity, and true love -- without actually having to sacrifice any of those things. Inevitably, the protagonist falls for the wrong person, who is usually more interested in wealth than integrity, thus extinguishing true love.

For someone so skeptical about the moral temptations of wealth, Barry certainly gravitated towards characters who are more than comfortably situated. It all makes for very cozy storytelling, since the protagonist eventually chooses the "right" love interest, who allows him (or her) to hold on to both wealth and integrity. A pretty neat trick, really.

The love triangle in The Animal Kingdom centers on Tom (Leslie Howard), who must choose between his former lover (Ann Harding) and his wife (Myrna Loy). If this movie were made after 1934 (post-code), Myrna Loy as the lawful wife would win hands-down; but this is the pre-code era, so Ann Harding as a bohemian artist has an actual chance at winning the prize that is Leslie Howard.

This is before Gone with the Wind made Leslie Howard seem like such a ninny.

 A note about our stars

Ann Harding is largely forgotten these days, but she's featured in several great pre-code films (Holiday, When Ladies Meet). In an era when most stars sported shorter curled coifs, Harding was remarkable for her long blonde hair, usually worn coiled at the nape of her neck.

Unless she's showing off.

Leslie Howard reminds me a bit of Tom Hiddleston. Howard won me over years ago as Sir Percy in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1936), which counteracted the terrible impression he made on me as Ashley Wilkes. Intelligent, attractive, and slightly feline, I don't blame Myrna and Ann for fighting over him. Rumor has it that he was quite the ladies' man in real life, too.

I cannot resist a pretty man in nerdy glasses.

Myrna Loy is, of course, stunningly beautiful. Since her start in the mid-20s, she had played a string of exotic "ethnic" characters, despite her own thoroughly northern European ancestry. Early film roles included "Slave Girl," "Inez Quartz," "Mai," "Roma," "Mulatta," "Azuri," "Yasmani," and "Carmita." Just prior to Animal Kingdom, Loy played the daughter of the titular villain in The Mask of Fu Manchu.

Oh, dear.

Cecelia is one of Loy's first major roles in which she is neither exotic nor a vamp, even if the character is manipulative and materialistic. In 1934, she would play Nora Charles in the first Thin Man movie, and cement herself as one of the most delightful leading ladies of the 1930s.

William Gargan plays Tom's butler/friend, "Red" or Regan. A former prizefighter, he's not exactly cut out for playing the posh butler that Cecelia requires. Gargan originated the role on Broadway, and although Red doesn't figure strongly into the love story itself, he steals most of his scenes in the movie. 

You may also recall him as the sympathetic attorney/boyfriend in The Story of Temple Drake.

The plot

Tom Collier (Howard) is a wealthy wastrel who has decided to marry Cecelia (Loy). This is quite a relief to his father, who hopes that Tom will finally settle down to do something other than being a wealthy bohemian. Cee is charming, clever, and believes in Tom, although her belief resides more in what he could do, rather than what he is doing.

Just as they are announcing their engagement to Tom's father and Owen (who is Tom's friend and, apparently, Cecelia's freshly-jilted boyfriend), complications arise. It seems that Tom has had a long-term relationship with an artist, Daisy, who has just returned to New York after being abroad for several months.

Tom rushes off to tell Daisy his news, in that annoying way the newly-smitten have of wanting to share their joy with the people least happy to hear about it. Daisy has news of her own: she has decided to give up commercial art and to become a painter; and she wants to marry Tom and have a child together.

Daisy is understandably disappointed to find Tom engaged to someone else. Tom argues that his marriage shouldn't have to come between them, but Daisy shows him and his fickle heart the door.

A few months pass, and Tom and Cecelia have plans to attend Daisy's art opening in the city. Cee, who doesn't actually want to go, artfully uses sex as a means of control, alternately dangling and withdrawing her favors. Tom is no match against the allure of Cecelia in a frilly negligee, and skips the exhibition.

"The way into my parlor is up a winding stair...."

The negligee wins the day.

It's interesting to contrast Cecelia's softness and subtlety against Daisy's straightforwardness, especially through the lens of costume and set design. The view from Daisy's apartment is dominated by the angular structure of a bridge, and the trim of Daisy's gown (and even her fingers against the black) echo these straight lines.

When Tom later waltzes into Daisy's apartment, their chemistry and intellectual compatibility flare once again. But Tom is terrible at being "just friends" -- his embraces are just a bit too long, and his kisses too lingering. He's the sort that would "accidentally" fall into bed with someone, and then make excuses about magnetism, or lack of closure, or temporary insanity. [I had an ex like that once. Not that I'm projecting, or anything.]

Daisy decides to flee the temptation of an almost inevitable affair. Her friend, Franc, helps her pack -- and THIS is the relationship I would cultivate if I were her.

Franc's gown features a bow made of mink. I love her.

I am shipping these two so hard.

More months pass, and Tom is clearly crumbling under Cecelia's persistent drive towards financial success. She's pressuring him to sell out his beloved small press to a mass-market publisher of middle-brow novels.

At a birthday party Cee throws for Tom's birthday, he drinks too much and snobbishly tries to make Red behave like a proper butler. Tom's treatment of Red serves as a kind of weather vane for his state of mind. Their friendship has eroded over time, until Tom is more exasperated employer than friend.

Meanwhile, Daisy and Cee are sizing up one another, and each despising what they see. Cecelia has been using her wiles on Owen, who is an attorney for the big publisher interested in Tom's press. Daisy walks in on them embracing on a sofa, just as Cee is "convincing" Owen to use his influence to further the acquisition. It's as awkward as you might expect.

I forgot to mention that the actor playing Owen will later go on to be Batman's Commissioner Gordon.

The film's climax takes place a few days later, as Tom and Cecelia celebrate the pending sale of his publishing press. Their intimate dinner in Cee's boudoir stirs Tom's memory of an expensive brothel he visited during the war.

"That's a very sexy check you're waving around, Tom."

While trying to be seductive, Cecelia overplays her hand about the connection her sexual favors and Tom's "agreeable" behavior. Cee says that selling the press and accepting the large cash gift from Tom's father are agreeable -- and constitute the sort of behavior that will lead to negligees and kisses. Spending time with bohemian friends and desiring "integrity" will lead to a locked bedroom door.

The structure of this shot parallels the image of Cecelia gloating over Tom's capitulation.

Cecelia doesn't notice when Tom's affection becomes sarcasm, and she retires to bed, expecting Tom to follow. Instead, he makes the check over to Cee and leaves it on the mantlepiece, just as he used to leave payment on the mantel at the brothel.

On his way out the door, To tells Red, "I'm going back to my wife, Red.... My wife, I said."  The end!

Thoughts

I'm kind of a sucker for Philip Barry's clever dialogue and ambivalent lovestories. None of the characters are wholly good or wholly wicked. Myrna Loy, in particular, deserves a lot of credit for making the character of Cecelia more appealing than she might have been. Tom is selfish, but charming and idealistic. Daisy will need that heart of gold if she's going to forgive Tom for his 18-month "affair" with Cecelia.

By casting Cecelia as a coy gold digger, the movie seems to absolve Tom of his fickleness toward Daisy. But most people familiar with The Ethical Slut would agree that getting married without consulting one's primary partner is hardly good polyamory etiquette. When she takes him back, Daisy needs to set up some ground rules toute de suite.

Critical reception of The Animal Kingdom was generally positive. Film Daily wrote:

Although the unconventional morality of its theme catalogues it as chiefly for broad-minded, sophisticated audiences, this Radio Pictures offering embraces so much fine artistry in its direction, acting and photography that it belongs undisputably in the front ranks of class productions.

Some reviewers disliked the wordy, theatrical style of the film. According to Picture Play's Norbert Lusk:

The characters talk and talk as they ceaselessly shred their thoughts and emotions into tatters of nothingness.... In fact, the straining after frankness and fearlessness is rather tiresome. But this display is important in making clear that la Loy can hold her own with stage sophisticates.

There's an alternate ending in my head in which Daisy and Franc are now an item, and Tom gets to play third wheel for a while.

I admit it. I love this movie. I love the characters, the dialogue, the mixed-up love story, the costumes, and Franc. You can watch it on Youtube. 

So much nuzzling in the Animal Kingdom!