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.
