Senses of Cinema
Great Directors
Issue No. 42, January-March, 2007
ors/07/mamoulian.html
ROUBEN MAMOULIAN
b. 8 October 1897, Tbilisi, Georgia
d. 4 December 1987, Los Angeles, USA
Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of
Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (University).
He is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, and editor of Cteq:
Annotations on Film, published in Senses of Cinema.
"Nostalgia for places one has never seen" (1)
In his canonical, often provocative, still influential if sometimes
damaging – at least in terms of its effect on the reputation of specific
filmmakers – account of Classical Hollywood cinema, Andrew Sarris relegates
Rouben Mamoulian to the category of directors whose artistic contribution to
American cinema offers "less than meets the eye". (2) The section of his
book devoted to this category is dominated by what he perceives as
inadequate or showy stylists, directors whose work ultimately betrays an
insufficient consistency and command of theme and a superficial deployment
of film form. Within this category Sarris dismisses the "technical
acrobatics" of Mamoulian’s films and relegates him to the historical status
of an "innovator who runs out of innovations". (3)
Although pre-empted by the earlier criticism of Mamoulian’s work by such
writers as Dwight MacDonald and Theodore Huff, (4) Sarris’ damningly brief
overview has bored down into the bedrock of auteurist film criticism. His
pithy dismissal has routinely furnished ammunition for the critics who have
followed Sarris’ lead, (5) and provided a point of departure for those
attempting to rehabilitate or champion the director’s refreshingly varied
and stylish work. For example, both of the book-length studies of
Mamoulian’s career so far published in English – Tom Milne’s groundbreaking
but overly laudatory critical study Mamoulian, (6) published in 1969, and
Mark Spergel’s immensely valuable, if snobbishly opinionated attempt to
discuss the nexus between Mamoulian’s personal life, theatre and film
career, Reinventing Reality, (7) published in 1993 – reiterate the critical
importance and centrality of Sarris’ brief and wearied dismissal. In fact,
Spergel’s substantial book vacillates between celebrating the very real
contribution Mamoulian made to the theatre and cinema and supporting Sarris’
uncharitable view. This is ultimately not surprising, as although Mamoulian
is undoubtedly a greater and more substantial director than Sarris allows
there is still a niggling sense that several of his criticisms ring at least
partly true. Nevertheless, on a film-by-film basis Mamoulian is definitively
one of the most intriguing filmmakers who worked in Hollywood in the 1930s
and ’40s.
In hindsight, it must be conceded that Mamoulian is a director who both
attracts auteurist approaches and frustrates them. His films betray a
consistency of approach, some common visual and thematic motifs, and a
definite sense of the artistic sensibility behind their creation, but they
are also maddeningly inconsistent in quality, varied in their approach to
genre, and don’t neatly align themselves with "classical" auteurist
criticism’s common preoccupation with hyper-masculinity or "closet"
femininity. Despite pretensions to the status of high art – signified by,
amongst other things, some of the sources of his adaptations and the
appropriation of particular painters’ visual styles – Mamoulian’s work is
often decidedly middlebrow and seemingly ideologically conventional. if not
conservative. This does not mean that his films are without subtextual
interest for contemporary viewers. For example, several critics have
provided unsurprisingly queer readings of The Mark of Zorro (1940), (8) or
have been attracted to issues of gender and performance in Applause (1929),
(9) while others have seen connections to the politics of early 1930s
America in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), (10) or been intrigued by the
unheralded ideological complexities of Silk Stockings (1957). (11)
Nevertheless, these evocative dimensions are mainly subsumed to the
conventions of the Hollywood cinema of the time and the "universal humanism"
that Mamoulian commonly explored through individual characters rather than
broader social and political formations. Mamoulian has also been criticised
for de-emphasising the importance and centrality of the often highly charged
social, political and sexual contexts in which his plays and films are set.
(12) Nevertheless, in the early 1930s Mamoulian stridently produced films
that flirted with the boundaries of sexual decorum and morality. This is
evidenced by the fact that after the full-scale application of the Hays Code
in 1934 his films struggled to be re-released without significant cuts and
changes. His initial high reputation, particularly up to 1932, also suffered
as a result of the lack of circulation of many of his films. Even today,
Mamoulian is seldom the subject of retrospectives or critical surveys. His
best films mostly circulate in isolation from one another and are more often
categorised in terms of genre and star than director. Mamoulian is hardly as
forgotten, neglected or under-celebrated as some other early 1930s Hollywood
directors, but the discussion of his career does not match the achievement
and volume of his work in the cinema and theatre, and his significance to
both. His place in cinema history is thus complex. It is also somewhat more
contested than it ought to be.
Mamoulian can be regarded as both an aesthetic and stylistic magpie who
seldom, with the exception of the musical, made two films in the one genre.
He is also a director perhaps overly fixated on the technical or
technological possibilities of cinema. For example, Mamoulian’s often
repeated and wearisome accounts of his singular contributions to film
history focus almost exclusively on the various technical innovations he
reputedly brought to the cinema: two-track sound recording and the mobile
camera to "early" sound film (Applause); disembodied voiceover (City
Streets, 1931); the zoom lens and asynchronous sound (Love Me Tonight,
1932); three-strip Technicolor (Becky Sharp, 1935) and its expressive and
fully artistic use (Blood and Sand, 1941); and numerous others. (13) Partly
due to the longevity of his life – he was born in Tiflis/Tbilisi, Georgia in
1897 and died in Hollywood in 1987 – Mamoulian was the willing subject of
numerous career interviews. In these barely distinguishable discussions, he
routinely told the same anecdotes and pontificated upon his rightful place
in the history of Classical Hollywood. This distanced and calculated
perspective was also reinforced by the relative brevity of his career: his
last Broadway play, Arms and the Girl, was staged in 1950 and his final
completed film, Silk Stockings, was released in 1957. These "rote" interview
performances constructed a version of his career that emphasised his genius
and singular artistic contribution to the films he made, as well as the
conflicts he endured with less creative producers and technicians. His
actual contribution is, of course, much more complex, collaborative,
circumscribed and convoluted than he commonly let on.
Contrary to the common view, Mamoulian produced his best work when he was
attached for a sustained period to a particular studio. Such a system of
indenture and enforced collaboration ran counter to the legend that
Mamoulian himself promoted. His early and in many ways best work was made
predominantly for Paramount, while his brief tenure at 20th Century-Fox,
under the stewardship of Daryl F. Zanuck, in the early 1940s, resulted in
two of his most striking and pictorially beautiful works; The Mark of Zorro
and Blood and Sand.
But Mamoulian’s productive studio attachments have also provided easy points
of negative comparison for critics seeking to undervalue his contribution to
film history. Mamoulian made two films at Paramount – Love Me Tonight and
Song of Songs (1933) – that are often compared to the contemporaneous work
done at the studio by Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg (two of only 14
directors included in Sarris’ ultimate pantheon). In both films, Mamoulian
worked expressly within and with the forms most associated with these
directors. He inherited specific thematic and narrative preoccupations, and
was asked to direct stars – Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in Love
Me Tonight, Marlene Dietrich in Song of Songs – whose careers were
intimately entwined with either director. Both projects were also initially
associated with Sternberg and Lubitsch. Sternberg himself recommended that
Mamoulian direct Dietrich for her first Hollywood film without her great
mentor.
Mamoulian’s work is ultimately marked by a pretension and tastefulness that
is comparative to but, in fact, miles away from the more baroque excesses of
Sternberg’s appropriation of "high" art. Mamoulian often displays a tendency
to isolate and "present" his influences, remarking upon his cleverness
afterwards. Sternberg mixes these elements up, rendering them in a more
innately cinematic, and explicitly critical, fashion (see, for example, the
use of classical music and religious art in The Scarlet Empress, 1934). Song
of Songs has rarely been discussed in much detail, and in spite of its
interesting analysis of Dietrich’s image, it really is significantly
inferior to the bulk of the Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations. But Love Me
Tonight is a considerably different proposition, and is the film most often
cited as evidence of either Mamoulian’s cinematic genius or the inflated,
superficial qualities of his work. Not surprisingly, critics such as Sarris
regard it as similar but inferior to such Lubitsch’s works as The Love
Parade (1929) and The Merry Widow (1934). But others see it as a joyous,
cinematically visionary work that is "Gay, charming, witty. everything that
the Lubitsch musicals should have been but never were". (14) I don’t think
that such a comparative approach is ultimately very useful. As James Harvey
has pointed out, Mamoulian and Lubitsch are actually very different
filmmakers, a fact that is actually highlighted by their varied adaptation
of similar material:
The Lubitsch films preceding it, even The Love Parade, are chamber films,
essentially small-scale and intimate. Love Me Tonight is a kind of bravura
effusion. That bravura element ran through all of Mamoulian’s films.
Mamoulian is a spectacularist; Lubitsch, the erstwhile "Griffith of Europe",
is not. (15)
The "spectacular" quality of Mamoulian’s films is evidenced by such elements
as: their constant shift of point of view; reliance upon the contrast of
medium close-ups and long shots; use of a wide variety of filmic devices;
ability to move between genres and tones; concern with characters’/actors’
identities and performances; and their more generally "presentational"
aesthetic.
Thus, Mamoulian is often characterised as the "third" director at Paramount
behind Sternberg and Lubitsch in the first half of the 1930s (is this such a
terrible place to be?). Mamoulian’s work is much more uneven and varied than
the work of these two other great auteurs. But his significant contribution
to American cinema also extends well beyond his initial tenure at the
studio. He is thus, in some ways, a paradigm for the jobbing Hollywood
director with some pretensions to art and personalised authorship, but who
was also pragmatic enough to take on projects for varied – sometimes mostly
technical or technological – reasons.
One of the richest and most fascinating of these assignments was Mamoulian’s
first film for MGM, Queen Christina (1933). This film is often singled out
for its languid bedroom scene between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Its most
remarkable moment features Garbo wandering nostalgically around the room,
memorialising it for some future moment of recollection. This almost
wordless pantomime underlines many of they key qualities of Mamoulian’s
cinema. It relies upon the mechanics and technical resources of the studio
system, as well as the mystique of stardom and celebrity. It is also almost
impossible to not recognise a melancholy that moves between the actors and
the characters they play, emanating from the roles they inhabit both within
and outside of the film. Christina’s immediate memorialisation of their
brief but sweet affair, points towards the film’s own nostalgia for the
real-life relationship of Garbo and Gilbert, as well as the actor’s
once-vibrant career. It is a sequence that moves between silent and sound
cinema, creating the kind of hybridised, isolated, abstracted world that is
the mark of Mamoulian’s work. But this sequence is also a product of the
studio, its focus on elements of décor, gesture and the glamorous posturing
of its impossibly attractive stars part-and-parcel of an overriding MGM
style. Its seeming miniaturist detail is rendered "spectacular" by the
glistening and veiled shimmer of its presentation.
Thus, although Mamoulian’s work was often striking it was seldom as
innovative, groundbreaking or iconoclastic as he led his interviewers to
believe. Thus, Sarris’ predominantly negative account of Mamoulian’s cinema
is also something of a welcome corrective to the director’s self-promotion.
The difficulties and fallowness of his later career are also perhaps the
ultimate outcome of his often-hostile relationship with his collaborators.
For example, Mamoulian was the director of the original Broadway productions
of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s groundbreaking Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel
(1945). Both of these productions allowed Mamoulian to further his attempts
to create and synthesise a truly organic and integrative theatrical
presentation, and were extraordinary critical and box office successes. But
Mamoulian’s endless self-aggrandisement and disagreement with the writers
over authorial accreditation resulted in him never working with the team
again or being offered to direct the large-scale film versions of either
musical in the mid-1950s. Mamoulian’s piecemeal film career – he completed
only 16 features over 30 years – across a variety of genres and studios, as
well as his famously aborted directorial contributions to Laura (Otto
Preminger, 1944), Porgy and Bess (Otto Preminger, 1959), and Cleopatra
(Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), also give evidence to both the uncompromising
strength of his artistic vision and how he chaffed against the necessarily
collaborative and commercial fields he worked within. Nevertheless, despite
his much cited affinity for the more solitary art of painting – and how, for
example, this influenced and directed the choice of colour and composition
in the Goya-Velasquez-El Greco-inflected Blood and Sand, or the many
Americana drenched frames of Summer Holiday (1948) that directly cited Grant
Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Curry – Mamoulian was also a showman,
perfectly suited to the popularisation and adaptation of "high art" forms
and sources. Despite his claims to the contrary, these forms and elements
were the outcome of the collaborative potential he found at such studios as
Paramount, MGM and 20th Century Fox. Thus, his value to Hollywood and
Broadway as a synthesiser and channeller of forms and multifarious creative
contributions should not be underestimated.
For a director who was brought to Hollywood – or initially to the East Coast
studios of Paramount as a dialogue coach and then to direct Applause – to
deal with the aesthetic crisis of the introduction of sound, Mamoulian
proved himself to be a peculiarly "cinematic" director, exploiting many of
his scenarios for the pure visual and sound ideas/situations they suggested.
Nevertheless, as I will illustrate, the distinctions between theatre and
cinema in Mamoulian’s work are not as clear as they might at first appear or
as definitive as he often let on: "It’s curious really. Here I had been
recruited as a stage expert on dialogue, and all I could think of was the
marvellous things one could do with the camera and the exciting new
potentials of sound recording. The camera fascinated me." (16) The seeds of
this attentiveness to the aesthetic possibilities of the cinema can actually
be traced to several of Mamoulian’s formative experiences in the theatre,
his attempts at expressive stylisation in the original stage adaptation of
DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy, in particular. Thus, for example, the
initial, rhythmic "symphony of street sounds" that opened this 1927 play was
appropriated and expanded for the percussively dynamic opening of Love Me
Tonight. Mamoulian combines this coup de thétre with a sense, construction
and transformation of space that is intrinsically cinematic. The single
perspective of the stage transformed into a dizzying montage of sounds and
points of view.
Mamoulian also furthered his theatrical experiments with fluid staging,
scene changes and general transitions in the cinema. This quality is
discussed by Milne in terms of how the distinction between dance and
non-dance, musical number and bridging dialogue sequence are often blurred
in Mamoulian’s films: "one is almost tempted to say that every Mamoulian
film is a musical. It isn’t true, of course, but with every action and line
of dialogue conceived in terms of stylised rhythm, choreographed rather than
directed – it feels as though it were." (17) Milne argues that this gestalt
sense of "stylised rhythm", as well as a feeling for true movement, are
Mamoulian’s great contributions to the cinema. At times his description and
analysis of the director’s work aligns it more closely with the European
avant garde of the 1920s. Thus, for example, the still somewhat "grounded"
staging of musical performances in the theatre is transformed, in the
mercurial Love Me Tonight, into a series of montage-driven musical numbers
that move across vast, opened out and interiorised spaces. The greatest
instance of this is the opening performance of "Isn’t it Romantic". The song
is casually introduced by Maurice Chevalier’s tailor and then taken up by a
range of quickly moving characters until it arrives at the chateau of
Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald), drifting dreamily from a gypsy
encampment. This sequence highlights the patent anti-realism of Mamoulian’s
approach – the use of rhyming dialogue, almost theatrical musical
performance, extra-diegetic sound – but also comes close to achieving the
director’s aim of "conveying truth through stylization and poetic rhythm".
(18)
Despite his truly significant triumphs in the American theatre, where his
status as one of directorial greats is more assured, it is only in the
cinema that Mamoulian was able to fully explore his quest for a truly
synthetic art form seamlessly combining music, performance, painterly design
and dynamic movement. It is common to celebrate much of Mamoulian’s early
work in the cinema, but to also insist upon the ultimate decline of his
films after the last, "proper" innovations of the first three-strip
Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp. This is not terribly surprising when one
straightforwardly compares such early, cinematically dynamic and somewhat
risqué works as Applause and Love Me Tonight with the seemingly more staid,
conventional and often nostalgic films of the second half of his career:
High, Wide and Handsome (1937), Summer Holiday and Silk Stockings. But Milne
proffers a different approach to Mamoulian’s oeuvre. Whereas Spergel takes a
conventional tack in relation to pinpointing the brief flowering of
Mamoulian’s genius and the long decline that followed, Milne provides a more
holistic account, highlighting the ongoing refinement of his work. The
patent artificiality of Mamoulian’s final films – Blood and Sand, Rings on
Her Fingers (1942), Summer Holiday and Silk Stockings – and their true
abandonment to the rhythms of movement, colour, composition and the body,
allows full expression to the overarching abstraction and anti-realism that
generally marks his work. It is thus hardly surprising that Mamoulian was
considerably less productive in the grittier, more cutthroat post-war era.
His only cinematic haven in this period was within the production unit of
Arthur Freed at MGM. But even there Mamoulian’s famously fastidious, slow
and unworldly working methods created considerable animosity. The ten-year
gap between his two final films is a clear pointer towards these problems.
Mamoulian’s approach to genre examines each – the western, musical,
swashbuckler, romance, horror, historical drama – for their capacity to
allow particular and appropriate technical innovations, flourishes and
preoccupations. Important examples include, the subjective point of view
shots that mark the horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the crane shots
in the outdoor musical western High, Wide and Handsome. Nevertheless, if any
genre seems closest to Mamoulian’s heart it is the musical – perhaps, the
most cinematic and theatrical of classical American genres. Like Mamoulian,
it was also the genre ushered into American cinema with the coming of sound.
Music and dance are integral to the rhythm and meaning of Mamoulian’s work
and provide an emphasis on movement that marks his great contribution to the
cinema. For instance, even a film like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde contains
several "musical" moments, which have pertinent things to say about both
class and the role of music as an index of culture and as a container of raw
emotion. This is probably the reason why Milne promotes Mamoulian’s final
film, Silk Stockings, as the crowning achievement of his career. The film
opens with a series of shots showing the walking-dancing feet of Fred
Astaire. Such a metonymic focus is characteristic of Mamoulian’s cinema.
This focus on feet appears numerous times in his work and the isolation of
body parts and their relation to the objects around them also marks the most
resonant scenes of many of his films (think of the final track into a
close-up of Garbo’s tabula-rasa like face in Queen Christina).
But this abstraction and isolation of body parts also provides a pointer
towards the key innovations of the film. Milne champions Silk Stockings
primarily for the way in which it prioritises the body and movement as
vehicles for developing the film’s story and expressing its emotional
content. This characteristic only becomes fully observable in the scenes
featuring the ever graceful Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Thus, although the
film is truly "innovative" in the ways in which it communicates many of its
narrative developments through bodily movement and expression, it is also
marred by an excessive and often frontal presentation of its performances,
as well as an uncomfortable use of the Cinemascope frame (parodied and
utilised in the number "Stereophonic Sound"). But the explicit and
prioritised dance movements of Silk Stockings can also be likened to many
other of the most remarkable moments in Mamoulian’s cinema: the brutal,
enclosed, but physically spirited fencing sequence in The Mark of Zorro; the
wonderful springing rhythm of the opening of Love Me Tonight; the gradually
unfolding ball on the eve of the battle of Waterloo in Becky Sharp; the
timeless metronomic motions and gestures of Garbo around the room that
represents her brief idyll in Queen Christina. All of these sequences have a
dance-like quality. But it can be argued that the frustratingly piecemeal
qualities of Silk Stockings are also characteristic of much of Mamoulian’s
work. Mamoulian himself, by discussing his never fully-realised aim of
creating a truly organic, moving cinema while isolating particular
innovations and artistic choices, reinforces this view.
In retrospect, the two most completely satisfying films of Mamoulian’s
career – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Love Me Tonight – were made back to
back at Paramount. Both showily exploit the dynamic possibilities of sound,
camera movement, various editing devices (particularly wipes and dissolves),
and montage. Looking back on all of his films of the early 1930s, it is
still possible to be surprised by the sheer audacity of specific techniques,
individual images, the pace of many sequences, and the often idiosyncratic
uses to which Mamoulian puts such common devices as dissolves, wipes
(particularly of the diagonal variety) and subjective point of view shots.
Nevertheless, Mamoulian’s well-documented experiments in early sound
(Applause and City Streets), location filming (High, Wide and Handsome) and
colour (Becky Sharp) still tend to obscure a more holistic approach to
technical innovations and their possible meanings which does characterise
his cinema. Thus, the playful sound experiments of films like Love Me
Tonight and Silk Stockings are totally in keeping with the key ideas and
sense of life explored in the films.
Mamoulian’s films also constantly provide interesting variations on and
insights into specific themes and familiar genres. For example, it is
integral to the impact and meaning of Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde in
Mamoulian’s adaptation that the effect is mostly achieved without the aid of
cuts or dissolves. This startling effect is not just an exhibition of
technical virtuosity. One literally has to emerge from within the other.
Also, the high number of subjective point of view shots in this film is
justified by the film’s exploration of themes of shifting identity (a common
Mamoulian preoccupation), subjectivity and the relation of the individual to
society. The movement from optical points of view to much more distanced
perspectives and compositions is also a constant of Mamoulian’s cinema. I
think it is possible to link this restlessly shifting perspective to
Mamoulian’s mixed career in theatre and cinema. Thus, the alternation and
movement between close-ups and extreme long shots is only possible in the
cinema – either through cutting or mobile framing – but the sense of
distance in many of Mamoulian’s compositions seems a legacy of his
theatrical background and the tyranny of the proscenium. Nevertheless, this
movement between expressly intimate and coolly detached perspectives
contributes significantly to how Mamoulian renders subjectivity and the
bifurcated identities of many of his protagonists. This hybrid technique has
the effect of pulling us into the cinematic space while placing us at a
distance, combining the oneiric qualities of the cinematic experience with
the clearly detached perspective of the theatrical spectator.
As should now be clear, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is both a technically and
conceptually ambitious film. It attempts to find techniques to help
communicate specific ideas and complicate easy moral positions. The use of
subjective point of view shots is perhaps the most effective of these
devices, but others compete for prominence elsewhere in the film. The use of
long dissolves is often remarkable, linking such techniques in Mamoulian’s
film to similar ones explored by Josef von Sternberg in The Scarlet Empress,
another Paramount film of the era which investigates the disturbing power of
abundant and unchecked sexuality (though Sternberg’s film is much more
ambivalent, ambiguous and playful than Mamoulian’s).
Time and the vacillation between various states of physical and
psychological being are also themes that run through the film. Both are
given numerous pictorial "illustrations". For example, the figure of the
pendulum or the hands of a clock are foregrounded in the shot where Ivy’s
bare leg moves backwards and forwards as it is superimposed on the image of
Jekyll departing from her apartment. This motif, or motion, returns several
times in the film, most clumsily as a wipe that moves in a vacillating
clockwise and anti-clockwise motion across the frame (producing some very
interesting split-screen images in the process). Despite the laboured
quality of this device it still manages to communicate a core idea of the
relativity of various states, characters, spaces, situations and class
positions. In particular, the sexual frustration experienced by Jekyll in
relation to his fiancée, Muriel (Rose Hobart), and its connection to the
freer sexuality of working-class Ivy, is visually communicated through this
technique. This focus on sexuality and class is a key, often troubling and
unresolved theme of many of Mamoulian’s films.
Spergel has suggested that much of Mamoulian’s work returns to the theme of
the divided public and private self. (19) This thematic motif is most
clearly schematised in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but is playfully and
seriously surveyed in many of his films. Sometimes, as in Song of Songs and
Queen Christina, this theme plays along the fault lines of the divisions
between actor, character, the public and the private self. In both these
films the central female characters, inhabited by Dietrich and Garbo
respectively, are required to make a division or distinction between their
public and private personas. Thus it doesn’t take too much of a leap to read
Garbo’s Queen Christina as a treatise on the attractions and hardships of
modern celebrity, as well as more specifically about the star herself. Such
a reading is supported by the initial publicity for the film, which actively
sought to blur this distinction between character and actor, to link the
royalty of the past with the celebrity of the present. In attempting to
relaunch Garbo’s film career – she had been absent from the screen for over
a year and legend abounded about her activities – and highlight the coolly
European salaciousness of her star persona, the film’s original trailer made
the following appeals to: "A Queen whose love affairs were as modern as
tomorrow’s tabloids"; "A 17th Century maiden who lived with 20th Century
madness".
Such a blurring of character and star persona, the past and the present, is
hardly unusual in the films of Dietrich and Garbo. But Mamoulian’s films
also constantly and more prosaically narrativise this complex division
between the public and private self. It is thus hardly surprising that many
of his films feature characters who are either not quite what they seem or
who are required to take on contrastive identities; mistaken identity is
also important to the plots of Love Me Tonight, Queen Christina, Songs of
Songs, amongst others. The obliteration of one of these selves, or the
closer alignment of the two, is often the key drama of the narrative. This
takes on its most obvious form in a film like The Mark of Zorro, where the
hero deliberately takes on two opposing personalities in order to hide his
true identity. It is also explored through the complex androgyny of Garbo in
Queen Christina, where she is, somewhat implausibly, mistaken for a young
man (highlighting, perhaps, the performative nature of all sexuality). The
journeys of the central female characters of Applause, High, Wide and
Handsome, Silk Stockings, and even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, take this form
as well.
Mamoulian’s cinema can also be considered as primarily presentational in its
form and style. Thus despite seeming to be explicitly cinematic –
particularly in the use of various devices that are impossible and often
have no correlative in the theatre such as wipes, expressive montage, varied
film speeds, etc. – there is still something that is explicitly theatrical
in the nature of his films. His films share an overriding interiority and
stage-like quality. Even such a seemingly action orientated film as Blood
and Sand is more accurately described as a mood piece lacking significant
exterior scenes and containing only glimpses of its strikingly staged
bullfights. We are thus mainly positioned away from the action, witnessing
other characters’ responses to the balletic but bloody scenes. Mamoulian’s
films are full of moments where characters seem less than involved in the
here-and-now of a particular time, place and situation, and more concerned
with how they are presented to the audience. In fact, such a shift in
emphasis often marks his adaptations of more socially grounded source
material by Tolstoy, Thackeray and O’Neill. Such relative "romps" as The Gay
Desperado (1936) and High, Wide and Handsome initially proceed at a
breakneck speed, introducing us to characters within the framework of a
performance. In High, Wide and Handsome this is relatively straightforward,
as the central character is introduced singing the title song at a medicine
show. Nevertheless, Irene Dunne’s excessive performance of the song
foregrounds the very act of annunciation. As a result, her performance seems
almost outside of the film’s world, on a pedestal, less keyed to the
spectators who appear in the frame than those who exist beyond it.
The opening of The Gay Desperado is even more revealing. This film
illustrates how self-aware Mamoulian could be of the forms he was working
within and of his own career narrative. The opening shots of the film,
coming after the iconic, cartoonish image of a sombrero under the credits,
are initially disorientating as they show what appears to be a rather brutal
and stylish gangster film caught in media res. The shots are, of course,
reminiscent of Mamoulian’s earlier City Streets. Our initial impressions are
subsequently undercut by the realisation that we are watching a
film-within-the-film. We then see and hear a group of Mexican bandits
responding to what is on the screen, discussing the ways they might
appropriate the modern methods of American gangsters. In short succession,
the film incorporates a fight within the cinema, several comic moments, and
a musical performance by a tenor who quietens the unruly mob. As in many of
Mamoulian’s films this impure and hybridised opening tells us much about the
film that is to follow. In its foregrounding of appropriation, adaptation
and its ambivalence towards modernity it also tells us much about
Mamoulian’s sensibility. For a director who was often extraordinarily lucid
and knowledgeable about new cinematic technologies in the first years of his
film career, Mamoulian quickly developed a taste for nostalgic Americana and
a suspicion of the benefits of the modern world. In fact, even such
contemporaneously set films as City Streets, Silk Stockings, Golden Boy
(1939) and Applause do not really have a genuine feeling for the present
day. For example, the vaudeville stages of Applause seem to belong to at
least the previous decade, while Silk Stockings’ portraits of Soviet and
Parisian life appear to evoke a quaint version of the 1930s rather than the
1950s.
Mamoulian’s films create somewhat solipsistic and explicitly imagined or
performed worlds. Thus, even the beautiful Ansel Adams-like night landscapes
of The Gay Desperado – one of Mamoulian’s most underrated films – are
striking because of their similarity to a series of other compositions. This
is probably a key reason why Mamoulian was actually so well-suited to the
studio system of the 1930s and early ’40s, as despite his often striking use
of locations, including actual New York stations and subways in Applause, it
is the artificiality of his expressly audio-visual compositions that most
defines his work. It is therefore not surprising that several commentators
have emphasised a patently abstract quality in Mamoulian’s films, a tilt
towards an experimental cinema that Sarris also expressed an ambivalent
attitude towards: "[Mamoulian is] one of the most eloquent spokesmen the
more experimental mainstream film has ever had". (20)
Nevertheless, Mamoulian’s legacy is still substantial and should not be
relegated to predominantly technical considerations. He was the main
catalyst in at least five outstanding Hollywood films, and his initial run
of six features is as strong, and important, as any other director of the
era. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Mamoulian was at his best
when working within the system, exploiting the extraordinary conflation of
artists, actors, writers, technicians and craftspeople that made the
Classical Hollywood cinema possible. For a few short years, Mamoulian was
one of a small number of directors who used Hollywood as a true studio
environment.
© Adrian Danks, September 2006
Endnotes:
1.. Part of a line spoken by Greta Garbo in Queen Christina.
2.. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions
1929-1968, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1968, p. 155.
3.. Sarris, p. 160.
4.. Dwight MacDonald, "Notes on Hollywood Directors", Introduction to the
Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs, The Noonday Press, New York, pp. 182-84
(originally published in 1933). See also, Huff’s response to MacDonald’s
essay: Jacobs, p. 207.
5.. See, for example, Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made it:
Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, Ballantine Books, New York,
1997, pp. 33, 618; Gilbert Adair, Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of
100 Years of Cinema, Faber and Faber, London and Boston, pp. 82-3.
6.. Tom Milne, Mamoulian, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969.
7.. Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben
Mamoulian, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J. and London, 1993.
8.. Catherine Williamson, "’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The
Mark of Zorro", Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 1997, p. 16.
9.. Jeffrey P. Smith, "’It Does Something to a Girl. I Don’t Know What’:
The Problem of Female Sexuality in Applause", Cinema Journal vol. 30, no. 2,
Winter 1991, pp. 47-60.
10.. Annalee Newitz, "A Lower-Class, Sexy Monster: American Liberalism in
Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Bright Lights Film Journal no. 15,
1995, pp.12-8, 50.
11.. Robin Wood, "Art and Ideology: Notes on Silk Stockings", Film Comment
vol. 11, no. 3, May-June 1975, pp. 28-31.
12.. This practice is consistently criticised by Spergel, particularly in
relation to such plays as Porgy and Bess and Lost in the Stars, and the bulk
of Mamoulian’s work in Hollywood.
13.. See almost any of the multiple interviews that Mamoulian gave in the
1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, or the articles he wrote to discuss and promote
the contribution his films made to the "technical" art of the cinema. The
best and most informative of the Mamoulian interviews are: David Robinson,
"Painting the Leaves Black: Rouben Mamoulian", Sight and Sound vol. 30, no.
3, Summer 1961, pp. 123-27; James R. Silke and Michael Shamamian (eds.),
Rouben Mamoulian: "Style is the Man", American Film Institute, 1971.
14.. John Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties, Tantivy Press, London, 1968,
p. 45.
15.. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges,
Da Capo Press, New York, 1998, p. 33.
16.. Interview with Mamoulian in Andrew Sarris (ed.), Hollywood Voices,
Secker and Warburg, London, 1971, p. 63. Mamoulian also claimed that, "I
didn’t bring any ideas from the theater because I don’t think that theater
can give any ideas to the films. They are different mediums. There is
nothing really in the theater than can contribute to films." See Harry A.
Hargrave, "Interview with Rouben Mamoulian", Literature/Film Quarterly vol.
10, no. 4, October 1982, p. 264.
17.. Milne, pp. 13-4.
18.. Sarris, Hollywood Voices, p. 63.
19.. See Spergel, pp. 1, 149-50.
20.. Ken Hanke, "Rouben Mamoulian", Films in Review vol. 39, no. 8-9,
August-September 1988, p. 403.
Filmography:
Applause (1929)
City Streets (1931)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
Song of Songs (1933)
Queen Christina (1933)
We Live Again (1934)
Becky Sharp (1935)
The Gay Desperado (1936)
High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
Golden Boy (1939)
The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Blood and Sand (1941)
Rings on Her Fingers (1942)
Summer Holiday (1948)
Silk Stockings (1957)
Select Bibliography:
Thomas R. Atkins, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: An Interview with Rouben
Mamoulian", Film Journal vol. 2, no. 2, January-March 1973, pp. 36-43.
John Baxter, Hollywood in the Thirties, Tantivy Press, London, 1968, pp.
43-9.
Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage, American Directors Vol. 1,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1983, pp. 234-7.
Lucy Fischer, "Applause: The Visual and Acoustic Landscape", Film Sound:
Theory and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1985, pp. 232-46.
John A. Gallagher and Marino A. Amoruco, "An Interview with Rouben
Mamoulian", The Velvet Light Trap no. 19, 1982, pp. 16-22.
Ken Hanke, "Rouben Mamoulian", Films in Review vol. 39, no. 8-9,
August-September 1988, pp. 403-13.
Harry A. Hargrave, "Interview with Rouben Mamoulian", Literature/Film
Quarterly vol. 10, no. 4, October 1982, p. 255-65.
James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges, Da
Capo Press, New York, 1998, pp. 31-4.
Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, "Rouben Mamoulian", The Celluloid Muse:
Hollywood Directors Speak, Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1971, pp. 128-43.
Richard Koszarski, "The Greatest Film Paramount Ever Made", Film History
vol. 15, 2003, pp. 436-43.
Peter Lehman, "Looking at Ivy Looking as Us Looking at Her: The Camera and
The Garter", Wide Angle vol. 5, no. 3, 1983, pp. 59-63.
Dwight MacDonald, "Notes on Hollywood Directors", Introduction to the Art of
the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs, The Noonday Press, New York, 1960 [article
originally published in 1933], pp. 182-84.
Rouben Mamoulian, "Colour and Light in Films", Film Culture no. 21, Summer
1960, pp. 68-79.
Rouben Mamoulian, "Some Problems in the Direction of Color Pictures",
Hollywood Directors 1914-1940 Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976
[article originally published in 1935], pp. 288-93.
Rouben Mamoulian, "Controlling Color for Dramatic Effect", Hollywood
Directors 1914-1940 Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977 [article
originally published in 1941], pp. 15-24.
Rouben Mamoulian, "Dialogue on Film", American Film vol. 8, no. 4,
January-February 1983, pp. 26-7, 67-9.
Tom Milne, Mamoulian, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969.
Annalee Newitz, "A Lower-Class, Sexy Monster: American Liberalism in
Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Bright Lights Film Journal no. 15,
1995, pp.12-8, 50.
David Robinson, "Painting the Leaves Black: Rouben Mamoulian", Sight and
Sound vol. 30, no. 3, Summer 1961, pp. 123-27.
Andrew Sarris (ed.), "Rouben Mamoulian Talking to Andrew Sarris, 1966",
Hollywood Voices, Secker and Warburg, London, 1971, pp. 60-8.
Andrew Sarris, "Rouben Mamoulian", The American Cinema: Directors and
Directions 1929-1968, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1968, pp. 160-1.
Michael Sevastakis, Songs of Love and Death: The Classical American Horror
Film of the 1930s, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London, 1993,
pp. 131-48.
James R. Silke and Michael Shamamian (eds.), Rouben Mamoulian: "Style is the
Man", American Film Institute, 1971.
Jeffrey P. Smith, "’It Does Something to a Girl. I Don’t Know What’: The
Problem of Female Sexuality in Applause", Cinema Journal vol. 30, no. 2,
Winter 1991, pp. 47-60.
Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian,
Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J. and London, 1993.
David Thomson, "Rouben Mamoulian", The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Little, Brown, Great Britain, 2002, p. 556.
George Turner, "Two-Faced Treachery", American Cinematographer vol. 80, no.
3, March 1999, pp. 188-96.
John Wakeman (ed.), "Rouben Mamoulian", World Film Directors vol. 1,
1890-1945, The H. W. Wilson Co., New York, 1987, pp. 710-14.
Wayne Warga, "Rouben Mamoulian", Action no. 9, vol. 5, September-October
1974, pp. 24-7.
Catherine Williamson, "’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of
Zorro", Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 1997, pp. 3-16.
Robin Wood, "Art and Ideology: Notes on Silk Stockings", Film Comment vol.
11, no. 3, May-June 1975, pp. 28-31.