Talkie Trouble: August 2016

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.