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From out of the chaos of an American film industry struggling to reinvent itself at the dawn of sound comes Rouben Mamoulian`s APPLAUSE, one of the most audacious and assured directorial debuts this side of Welles` KANE. Plucked from Broadway by nervous Paramount execs, theatre director Mamoulian shattered the oppressive technical limitations imposed by early sound recording and shocked his bosses by transforming a backstage melodrama into a stunning cinematic masterpiece. Film historian William K. Everson declared APPLAUSE "an oasis of filmic sophistication in a desert of stage-bound early talkies."
Fearing for both her waning career and for the reputation of her young daughter April, good-hearted Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan), aging dime-store doyen of New York`s gritty burlesque nether world, sends April away to a convent school free of the hard knocks that showbiz life guarantees. When, years later, Kitty is reunited with the grown April (Joan Peers), motherhood and career clash in the fading limelight. Loyal to a mother she`s never known and both repulsed and fascinated by a beckoning world of sleaze and sawdust, April fends off Kitty's predatory lover while shyly fanning the fires of first love.
"I insisted on a fluid camera," Mamoulian recalled years after his landmark film debut. His all-seeing camera eye prowls through and beyond a shadowy backstage underworld to capture the tempos and textures of New York City itself. In lyrical scenes shot on location atop skyscrapers, within the old Penn Station, and upon the Brooklyn Bridge, APPLAUSE offers, as one period review enthused, "pictures of New York as the city has never been photographed before."
Helen Morgan