Kitty is the darling of burlesque until she ages out, old and washed up before her time, while her daughter April reluctantly subsumes her moniker. Director Rouben Mamoulian creates one of the first genuine classics of early sound cinema, breaking tropes with roving compositions, extreme angles, looming shadows, frenetic blocking and creative use of montage. The sound design with often overlapping dialogue and diegetic music is also used effectively to convey a gritty realism to the sultry backstage lifestyle of the characters. Set design and cinematography are top-notch but it’s Helen Morgan’s self-deprecating performance as Kitty Darling, a role that is neither glamorous nor full of sex-appeal, that propels this film to classic status. This film is one of the great Directorial debuts in film history and should have a much higher reputation among cinephiles!
Mamoulian and his DP George Folsey designed two great match-cuts: when Kitty and her daughter April embrace before she’s sent away to a boarding school: the focus is upon their hands which dissolves to April’s hands holding the rosary, now in the embrace of a nun. This works as a transition in time and place yet retains the immediacy of emotional attachment/detachment. The second is a match-cut during April’s breakup with her Sailor boy (in order to support her mother on the Vaudeville burlesque circuit) as she lifts a glass of water to her lips and cut-to Kitty’s now empty and cloudy glass of poisoned water we know she just purposely ingested as she lowers it from her lips. It’s a great cut with emotional impact and movement.
The frantic backstage scenes of buxom and scantily clad women rushing to their marks, stage managers barking orders while the dancers hit the stage, create such a utilitarian atmosphere that it almost feels like a documentary at times. The crowd scenes of old men with their phallic cigars, eyes fixated upon the pale flesh paraded before them is disarming; their cruel mockery of Kitty while enshrouded in thick smoke, their own fat asses squeezed into cheap seats, paying for the opportunity to cop a feel doesn’t seem hypocritical to their calloused minds. But this perfidy is perfectly captured and framed by Mamoulian and Folsey, allowing the film audience (us) to come to our own conclusions and judgments. Another great scene has April walking home alone one early morning after her mother’s performance: Folsey tracks his camera and focuses only upon her legs as she stalks home, being molested by a man who only want to “help” a lonely defenseless girl. As she fends him off, the camera still focuses without edit upon her shuffling feet, choreographed and timed like a dance sequence! This scene ends when another young man makes her acquaintance by punching the instigator in the face. Of course, this begins April’s love affair which will threaten her mother’s financial future (or at least April is manipulated into believing so).
The final scene of April and her lover being reunited under a giant sized poster of Kitty Darling is heartbreaking as we (the viewer) know something that these two lovebirds have yet to discover. The film dissolves to blackness before the revelation we know shall come in a few moments. It is a bittersweet ending for a tragic film. But it’s perfect.
Final Grade: (A+)
