Applause
(1929)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C Extras: B- Film: A-
If you
think you have heard of every important film ever made, think again. Rouben Mamoulian’s 1929 directorial debut Applause was an instant classic and
took filmmaking into an artistic, progressive direction very soon after the
arrival of sound. Exceeding the gimmick
of being a mere “talkie” (which is not such a bad thing to begin with,) its
uncanny application of film sound made it a landmark and established that icon
of Hollywood dreams, successes, and nightmares:
The Backstage Musical.
Kitty
Darling (the legendary Helen Morgan) is an aging Burlesque star who wants to
make sure her 5-year-old daughter April to not be in the ugly rut of a life the
dark side of showbiz has left her in.
She sends her to be raised in a convent, but the daughter is about to
return to her mother twelve years later.
This may sound melodramatic, but the short 79-minutes-long running time
never allows the film to waste its time on sappiness, which helps the film age
more gracefully than it otherwise would.
Can
mother and daughter pick up where they never left off? Showing some of the blatant male sexism is
bold on the part of Garrett Fort’s screenplay adaptation of Beth Brown’s book
and it is amazing how Mamoulian runs with the basic innovations men like D.W.
Griffith and he fellow directors henceforth established since the early
1910s. Mamoulian was so innovative and
groundbreaking on his own, you can not only see it in so many of his films, but
know it in the fact that he was a founding member of no less that The
Director’s Guild of America.
Her
mother’s new boyfriend is a greedy, misogynistic. flat out ignorant pig, who
wants to marry Kitty, but have sex with her daughter. April will not tell her mother, then meets a
sailor and they have a mutual attraction to each other. Though we have seen this basic story turn
into a formula later, it is charming to see the story when it was new, a true
original.
The full
frame 1.33 X 1 image is in remarkably good condition for a film
three-quarters-of-a-century old. Paramount sold all their films up to 1949
to then-Universal Pictures owners Music Corporation of America (the practically defunct MCA), so
they have had them ever since. MCA bought
them for TV syndication from Paramount, when the medium was new. It turned out to be a coup for MCA and a big
long-term loss for Paramount, now more than ever. Universal has been the caretaker of that
vital film catalog ever since and it helped turn them into a major like Paramount, versus the pre-WWII/pre-TV
years, when they were a “little sister” studio.
The video
black is good, as is the grey scale.
Clarity is remarkable for its age and makes sitting through this classic
a pleasure, though the scratches should have been wet gated away before the
transfer source was used. Only a High
Definition version or new film print form the same material is going to look
better. Kino has delivered another winning
transfer of a classic, which honors the work of cinematographer George J. Folsey,
A.S.C., to a tee.
The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono is ironically a cleaned-up reproduction of the first film ever
to be made in a two-channel monophonic mix.
That makes it a groundbreaker if there ever was one. The sound by today’s fidelity standards is
average, but that this actually survived as well as it did from 1929 is
monumental and ranks up there with Howard Hawks’ original Scarface (1932) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) as giant steps forward in sound innovation as
we know it. Background noise can be
heard, but it sounds cleaned up and a bit compressed, but it is just fine
otherwise.
Extras
include a text piece inside the DVD case by Miles Kruger, still/step sections
with rare photos, posters, and press materials, a cool newsreel piece of Morgan
singing “What I Wouldn’t Do For That Man”
with full orchestra that begins and ends with a giant magazine cover featuring
her opening and closing on the bed set where she sings the song, censorship
files on the film that show how much farther the film could have gone, an excerpt
of the original novel that was a hit at the time, a so-so condition clip of
Morgan from Glorifying The American Girl
(another Paramount musical the same year as Applause), biographer Christopher Connelly’s abbreviated look at
Morgan in three sections, and a print interview with Mamoulian at the time of
the film’s release.
That
nicely rounds out a fine package that is very collectible and one of the best
films of the 1920s. This Hollywood classic is long overdue for DVD
and Kino delivers, along with some other early Mamoulian titles. That is enough to make all of us rise up in Applause.
- Nicholas Sheffo
