No Affinity for Naturalism
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Once upon a time, between the wars, a brilliant young theater director made such a huge splash on the New York stage that Hollywood came calling. While shooting his first feature, the director flouted soundstage conventions and made technical demands that puzzled his collaborators and worried his studio bosses. The resulting movie looked and sounded like nothing else at the time and stands as one of the most audacious debuts in the history of American cinema. The director’s subsequent Hollywood career was marked by firings and front office strife, and when he died in the mid-’80s, he hadn’t completed a picture in decades. Nevertheless, each of the movies he made was crafted with a theatrical verve and absolute mastery of filmic expression that reward both casual viewing and minute study.
The director’s name was not Orson Welles, but Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), and beginning last Friday and continuing through next Tuesday, Film Forum II will screen every one of the 16 films in his marvelous and maddeningly small body of work. “My aim always was rhythm and stylization,” Mamoulian told an interviewer during his long retirement, and whether a musical, swashbuckler, horror film, gangster picture, comedy, or drama, every one of his films pulses and swings with a tempo and energy that few directors could conduct with the same taste and intelligence.
Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and educated in Paris, Mamoulian became involved with the vanguard Moscow Art Theater, birthplace of the Stanislavski acting “system,” while studying law in college. But the Moscow Art Theater’s ideological emphasis on representational realism over presentational theatrics didn’t suit the nascent director any more than law school did. “I discovered I had no affinity for naturalism,” he later said. A subsequent offer of a job from the founder of Eastman Kodak, George Eastman, to direct opera in Rochester, N.Y., was a better fit. Rochester provided a jumping off point for higher profile shows in London and with the Theater Guild in New York, which Mamoulian staged with a “distinction and brilliance not easily matched,” according to the New York Herald Tribune. His 1927 “Porgy,” featuring a musical sequence composed of street scene noises, was a particular sensation.
The inevitable call from Hollywood came from nervous executives in an industry struggling to adapt itself to talking pictures. Mamoulian spent five weeks on Paramount’s Astoria stages watching filmmakers shoot through cumbersome glass dividers that separated noisy cameras from microphones while actors adjusted their performances as much to suit the sound recordist’s needs as the director’s vision. When it came time for Mamoulian to helm his 1929 debut film “Applause,” the director chose to make the picture his way.
“The camera should not be treated as a witness of things happening,” he told a journalist visiting the “Applause” set. “It should be the main actor in a picture.” In addition to driving the cameraman for “Applause,” George Folsey, to distraction with his demands for graceful camera movements, location shooting, and imaginative angles, Mamoulian challenged the technicians in Paramount’s sound department to make it possible for two actors to speak at the same time in different parts of the frame, something that the era’s primitive single track recording had hitherto rendered impossible. The finished film’s prowling views of a tawdry backstage world and realistically overlapping voices elevate what was otherwise a conventional sawdust and tinsel melodrama into a film that the historian William K. Everson singled out as “an oasis of filmic sophistication in a desert of stage-bound early talkies.”
“Applause” established Mamoulian’s reputation as both an innovator and an impatient perfectionist on set. It also set the standard for his films’ distinctive opening sequences, in which the viewer is quickly and subtly indoctrinated into the story and themes via a few pithy directorial strokes. “Love Me Tonight” (1932) coopted the director’s earlier “Porgy” stage success with an opening scene in which the sounds of Paris waking up to sweeping brooms, pickaxes, carpet beaters, and hammers dovetails into the film’s musical overture.
On the way to establishing the movie musical form that MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit would become known for a decade later, “Love Me Tonight” incorporated zoom lenses and slow motion, two filmic techniques that wouldn’t become commonplace until the ’60s. But to merely catalogue the formal prescience of “Love Me Tonight” would do a great disservice to the film, its director, and anyone who’s never seen it. Pre-Code Hollywood never produced another movie that so effortlessly mixed daffy charm with leering sexual innuendo.
Though Film Forum’s Mamoulian retrospective includes such technical benchmarks as the first Technicolorfilm (“Becky Sharpe,” 1935), and a version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1932) whose transformation scenes advanced both makeup and camera science, it would also be a disservice to merely praise Mamoulian as an innovator. Deliriously fun, gorgeous to look at and blessed with distinctive cadences and perfect narrative pitch, each of Rouben Mamoulian’s films achieves, as the director told the Herald Tribune in 1929, a “higher inflammability” that this unsung master stylist of Hollywood’s golden age sought to bring to mainstream American picture-making.