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IMDbPro

Applause

  • 19291929
  • PassedPassed
  • 1h 20m
IMDb RATING
7.1/10
1.4K
YOUR RATING
Helen Morgan in Applause (1929)
DramaMusicalRomance
A burlesque star seeks to keep her convent-raised daughter away from her low-down life and abusive lover/stage manager.A burlesque star seeks to keep her convent-raised daughter away from her low-down life and abusive lover/stage manager.A burlesque star seeks to keep her convent-raised daughter away from her low-down life and abusive lover/stage manager.
IMDb RATING
7.1/10
1.4K
YOUR RATING
    • Rouben Mamoulian
    • Beth Brown(story)
    • Garrett Fort(adapted by)
  • Stars
    • Helen Morgan
    • Joan Peers
    • Fuller Mellish Jr.
    • Rouben Mamoulian
    • Beth Brown(story)
    • Garrett Fort(adapted by)
  • Stars
    • Helen Morgan
    • Joan Peers
    • Fuller Mellish Jr.
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 29User reviews
    • 22Critic reviews
  • See production, box office & company info
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Awards

    Photos10

    Helen Morgan, APPLAUSE, Paramount, 1929, **I.V.
    "Applause" Helen Morgan 1929 Paramount ** I.V.
    Fuller Mellish Jr. and Helen Morgan in Applause (1929)
    Fuller Mellish Jr. and Helen Morgan in Applause (1929)
    Helen Morgan in Applause (1929)
    Helen Morgan in Applause (1929)
    Applause (1929)
    Jack Cameron, Fuller Mellish Jr., Helen Morgan, and Joan Peers in Applause (1929)
    Lotta Burnell, Jack Cameron, Fuller Mellish Jr., Helen Morgan, Joan Peers, Billie Bernard, Alice Clayton, and Phyliss Bolce in Applause (1929)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Helen Morgan
    Helen Morgan
    • Kitty Darling
    Joan Peers
    Joan Peers
    • April Darling
    Fuller Mellish Jr.
    • Hitch Nelson
    Jack Cameron
    • Joe King
    Henry Wadsworth
    Henry Wadsworth
    • Tony
    Billie Bernard
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Phyliss Bolce
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Lotta Burnell
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Alice Clayton
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Florence Dickerson
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Viola Gallo
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    E. Graniss
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Mary Gertrude Haines
    • April as a child
    David Holt
    David Holt
    • Jack Singer
    Madge McLaughlin
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    May Miller
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Sally Panzer
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
    Claire Rose
    • Beef Trust Chorus Girl
      • Rouben Mamoulian
      • Beth Brown(story)
      • Garrett Fort(adapted by)
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The subway scene was filmed at Chambers Street on what is now the BMT Nassau Street line in lower Manhattan. Chambers Street was a terminus at the time this movie was made, and the train, consisting of a single Triplex unit, operated from the southern end of the station on the second track from the east side and stopped where the camera was situated. The platform used by the passengers in the movie is still in use today.
    • Goofs
      When April comes backstage to see Kitty after returning home from the convent, the shot from outside the dressing room shows Kitty sitting at her mirror and then turning to see April in the doorway. In the next shot, from inside the dressing room, she once again is sitting at her mirror and once again turns to see April entering.
    • Quotes

      April Darling: It's wonderful.

      Tony: You're wonderful.

    • Connections
      Edited into American Pop (1981)
    • Soundtracks
      Alexander's Ragtime Band
      (uncredited)

      Music by Irving Berlin

      [main title music]

    User reviews29

    Review
    Review
    Featured review
    9/10
    One of the greatest early talkies
    One of the greatest of the early talkies Applause was also the debut feature of Rouben Mamoulian, whose later successes include the celebrated Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde (1931) starring Frederic March, one of Garbo's finest vehicles Queen Christina (1933), as well as the groundbreaking Technicolor production Becky Sharp (1935). Lured into cinema after great success in theatre, like Welles later on Mamoulian found out how to make films in a crash course partly of his own devising: by absorbing the process at studios in New York, resolutely watching the work of others until he "learned what not to do." Hired ostensibly as a stage expert on dialogue to help make the most of the new sound medium, Mamoulian, again like the future Welles, quickly proved himself an all-round innovator, looking at production with fresh eyes with an ability to reinvent aspects of cinema as he found them. "All I could think of was the marvellous things one could do with the camera and the exciting new potentials of sound recording," he said.

    Applause was the result - a film which still astonishes us today, let alone those who saw it for the first time 80 years ago when sound had made considerable attack on the creative freedom previously taken for granted by silent films.

    Mamoulian's choice of subject matter for his first feature initially seemed to promise little that was striking: a somewhat hoary old novel about a fading burlesque queen sacrificing herself for her daughter, which promised much melodramatic moralising. But the fledgling director was to prove not so much interested in the story as in the way he could find of telling it, invigorating the material.

    Mamoulian's practical experience of film-making was gained largely by sitting on the sidelines at Paramount's New York studios. His theoretical inspiration may one suspects, but cannot prove, have been inspired elsewhere: notably the expressive use of fluid cinematography shown in Murnau's great American opus Sunrise, made and released to huge industry interest just a few short years before. Indeed, Mamoulian was later to use the great German's director of photography when he later came to make Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. In Applause we find moments of expressionism mingled with lyricism with which the German would find himself at home. Like Murnau, Mamoulian too set out to tell his story primarily through the movement of his camera, adding to this some striking location work. The earlier director was not constrained by the mechanics of soundtrack; where Mamoulian took a step forward was in the way he insisted that few of the limitations of the new format since then were necessary, a fact shown by the fact many of his experiments in Applause have become common film language.

    This approach becomes apparent right from the opening scene, where the thought is more more in terms of travel than of sound: first a few shots of a closed shop front, then a track along a newspaper-blown street. A small dog is rescued from the litter by a girl, before a brass band introduces her and us to the arrival of the burlesque queen, Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan), and her progress in an open carriage. The film cuts to inside her theatre, tracks steadily past musicians in the pit, pans back and forth over the dancing bodies on stage before finally resting on the tired faces of the chorus girls. Mamoulian's concern with the "delight of movement" as he put it, is everywhere. Such concerns brought technical considerations for the sound men that were at first considered impossible. One later scene in particular brought on a significant crisis, where Kitty sings a burlesque song to her daughter by way of lullaby as the child simultaneously whispers her prayers (this in a long single take). The primitive microphone picked up one and not the other, so the director suggested using two mics, and mixing it together later. From such guileless innovations are revolutions made; after some strenuous initial doubts, the studio heads gave Mamoulian carte blanche to continue the film just as he sought fit.

    Applause is one of those movies where virtually every scene demands attention for the interested viewer, either by virtue of Mamoulian's skill or, in the case of Helen Morgan, through an especially moving performance. The director had filled his cast with those who were as new to the medium of film as he was. Some, like Fuller Mellish, playing the city slicker, as well as Jack Cameron (Kitty's predacious beau) overplay slightly in that 1930s wiseacre fashion distracting to modern taste - one of the film's few weaknesses - but Morgan's pathetic dignity more than compensates for this and edges the melodrama onward into tragedy. Even the doomed, blossoming romance between Kitty's daughter April (Joan Peters) and her sailor, although somewhat hackneyed in expression, becomes acceptable in the hands of such a sensitive director who to their scenes together, as critic Tom Milne noted, "brings a simple lyricism which is neither faux nor naïf". A particularly fine moment is provided by the lovers' subway platform farewell shot, again in long take. The two have been forced apart by ironic circumstance but he does not know why. April's lover has little say in his despondency but, almost absent-mindedly, buys and pushes a cheap packet of gum from a machine into her hand as a leaving present. Another director would have made this pathetic action trite; Mamoulian makes it say everything there is to say about a closing relationship between two people, where something so slight can be so precious.

    It would have been too easy to produce a first work that showed off for its own account. But Applause remains so compulsive because it succeeds both as an empathetic story of people and as a technical tour-de-force, without one overbalancing the other. It is also exhilarating as it shows how imagination and creative determination liberated film even at this early stage, from self-imposed limitations.
    helpful•13
    3
    • FilmFlaneur
    • Jan 5, 2010

    Details

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    • Release date
      • January 4, 1930 (United States)
      • United States
      • English
    • Also known as
    • Filming locations
      • Kaufman Astoria Studios - 3412 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, New York City, New York, USA
    • Production company
      • Paramount Pictures
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Technical specs

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    • 1 hour 20 minutes
      • Black and White

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