Helen Morgan is brilliant as an aging burlesque queen making a desperate attempt to prevent her daughter from following her into the sordid world of striptease, in this first film of Rouben Mamoulian, a director who came to Hollywood via Broadway (where he is best remembered for his staging of “Porgy and Bess”) from Russian Georgia. Applause, which marked a revolution in the use of both sound and camera, is called by William K. Everson “a major achievement - as important a film in 1929 as Welles' Citizen Kane was in 1941.” The resourceful Mamoulian not only mobilized the camera by putting the whole camera booth on wheels, and used, for the first time, two cameras, in Applause; he also introduced the superimposition of sound tracks. Everson suggests that “technique had not yet caught up with inspiration” in this use of sound, and Tom Milne, in his book “Mamoulian,” stresses the intent behind the innovative work of this “master at stating the unstateable by understatement”:
“Remarkable enough even today, the film must have seemed - and indeed was hailed as - a real eye-opener in those days of talk, talk and more talk, stage-bound by cumbersome equipment enclosed in soundproof booths. The very opening sequence indicates that Mamoulian was thinking in terms of movement rather than sound, and in terms of cinema rather than theatre....”