The Mark of Zorro

With the possible exception of Stanley Kubrick, no director who worked in the Hollywood studio system ever exerted more influence over the entire field of film, and the sensibilities of audiences, than Rouben Mamoulian. With an output of a mere 16 movies across just 30 years, the Russian-born Armenian-descended Mamoulian, working as director and producer much of the time, managed to generate an array of classic films in the musical, dramatic, and action-adventure fields, and was also involved in the planning and all but the final direction of three renowned Hollywood films.

Rouben Mamoulian was born in Tbilisi — which was 60-percent Armenian at the time — in Russian Georgia, in 1897. He attended university in Moscow, studying law, no less, when he decided to join the Second Studio at the Moscow Art Theater, where he studied under Vakhtangov. It was during Mamoulian’s early training as an actor and a director that he learned the importance of rhythm — structural rhythm — in creating and shaping a work for the stage. He was initially an actor but soon turned to directing and producing, and got his first assignments in those areas in London in 1922. He was successful, and offers started coming in, among them one from a totally unexpected quarter — Rochester, NY. A western New York city that was relatively wealthy at the time, as the home of the Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester was in the midst of a furious process of pulling itself up artistically by its own bootstraps. There were wealthy residents with time on their hands and an itch for culture, living a half-day’s ride from New York City, and they wanted culture in their backyard, and the wealthiest and most ambitious of all of the city’s residents in that connection was George Eastman, the founder of the company that bore his family name. He was in the process of putting together the American Opera Company in Rochester, and offered Mamoulian the opportunity to organize it and direct at a brand new theater.

Mamoulian spent over two years there directing operas and operettas by Wagner, Debussy, Lehar, and Gilbert & Sullivan. These were fiercely inventive productions, more striking for their presentations than for their music, for in them Mamoulian drew together dance, drama, song, and poetry all under the most daring conceptions of lighting, choreography, and set design. His work in Rochester came to notice in New York City and led to his being hired away by the Theatre Guild — he briefly returned to London in the mid-‘20s, but then was back in New York to direct Porgy, the all-black dramatic work, which took the theater world by storm in 1927, and led to the creation of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, which Mamoulian also directed. He next enjoyed a huge success with Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions, and became O’Neill’s director-of-choice from that point on.

It was this series of works which paved the way for his move to Hollywood with the coming of sound at the end of the decade. The movie mecca was in desperate need of directors who could work comfortably and even creatively in the new medium of sound films, and Mamoulian’s stage productions made some of the most inventive use of sound, as well as daring approaches to storytelling and narrative, that had ever been seen. On the recommendation of Walter Wanger, the future film producer (who sat on the board of the Theatre Guild), Paramount Pictures hired Mamoulian, officially as a script doctor. He immediately turned around and told the two heads of Paramount, Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky, that he wanted to direct, and that he would work around the lot, watching how established directors and cinematographers did their work, how the sound men did their jobs, and the editors functioned, and anything else he needed to find out, and learn everything he needed to know. Such was his reputation from the stage, that the two moguls readily agreed to his idea, thinking that in six months or so, he might come back to them, prepared to try his hand at making a film.

Five weeks later, Mamoulian told them that he was ready to direct his first movie. The result was Applause (1929), which proved to be among the finest and most dramatically challenging of the early talkies. It was a backstage musical drama, about two generations of women in a family on the fringes of the entertainment business, the poverty circuit of burlesque. Helen Morgan, then among the top actresses in the world, fresh from her stage triumph in Show Boat, was the star, but Mamoulian treated her role in the film in a manner that would have been unthinkable for anyone in the picture business. He had this most glamorous of actresses put on 35 pounds and take the role of a well-meaning but sloppy, slovenly out-of-wedlock mother, a third-rate burlesque performer in a fourth-tier level of the business, all without a trace of glamour to be found. What audiences and the studio got instead was a magnificent performance in a lively but ugly and seedy drama, a musical without a single complete musical number in it, in which the musical numbers are nothing but incidental backdrops to the drama and the visual storytelling, which took us all over the city of New York, from the Times Square subway station to a rooftop amid a forest of high rises and skyscrapers, but never let us get too far from the run-down burlesque background of the principal characters.

In 1929, a year in which many filmmakers were struggling to figure out how best to use sound — and in which the sound component of many movies lay like a lead weight chained around a compromised visual component — Mamoulian debuted with the movie that fully integrated sound into its narrative, and in which the camera was always moving, an ability that had been lost for most filmmakers with the arrival of the microphone. In his own view, he had almost lost his opportunity to direct, over a dispute with cinematographer George Folsey and the sound department regarding the shooting of one key dramatic scene — instead, he revolutionized the shooting of sound films by successfully introducing a second microphone into a scene, to record dialogue from a separate source that would be mixed later with the primary dialogue. And amid that technical smoothness and innovation, Mamoulian was visually, stylistically inventive, and daring — he even had the temerity in his approach to the story to make the dancers and chorus girls look fat and ugly, while the nuns looked lithe and graceful.

Applause was expensive to make and it troubled — or, at least, puzzled — the studio in some of its attributes, but it was a critical and commercial success. Over the next few years, Mamoulian proved to be one of the most distinctive directorial voices in Hollywood, and among the most defiantly original, in an industry in which the producer and the studio tended to dominate even some of the most creative talents. Over the next few years, he delivered some of the most daring and visually exciting films in the fields of thrillers City Streets (1931), horror Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), musicals Love Me Tonight (1932), and costume drama Queen Christina (1933), as well as the first three-strip Technicolor feature ever made in Hollywood, Becky Sharp (1935). Many of these movies featured striking stylistic and technical innovations that we take for granted today: the use of voice-over conveying internalized monologue, reflecting the thoughts of the character, in one of City Streets’ most dramatic moments; the diagonal wipes and split-screen effects in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and the entire color design in Becky Sharp, among the earliest uses of color design for dramatic effect in a feature film. And, yet, for all of his expertise on the technical and structural, visual side of filmmaking, Mamoulian also found the room in his work to allow actors to excel at what they did best: Helen Morgan gave one of the best performances of her career in Applause, and Gary Cooper took another step up toward his dominance of the screen as “The Kid” in City Streets, showing a range and charisma that still leaps off the screen 75 years later; Fredric March earned the only Best Actor Academy Award ever given for a performance in a horror movie in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and much of Greta Garbo’s screen persona of later decades was defined by her work in Queen Christina.

There are some striking common themes in these early films by Mamoulian, in terms of subject matter, that go to the very substance of the films themselves. All of these movies feature struggles by their main characters over the duality of their nature as human beings: the burlesque entertainer in Applause, who sees herself as far more attractive than she actually is, trying to be a responsible mother; the hero and heroine in City Streets, trying to stay uncorrupted; the hero of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde risking his reputation and finally his life trying to prove the dual nature of man; and the heroine of Queen Christina, resisting the obligations of being a woman of noble birth. And even in his later movies, such as Golden Boy, the choice of subject is clear — William Holden’s Joe Bonaparte struggling over whether to pursue life as a violinist or make quick money in the boxing ring. As a director, Mamoulian seemed creatively stimulated by these choices and dualities, in film after film.

Mamoulian interspersed his movie career with returns to Broadway, where he continued to enjoy an uninterrupted string of successes on the stage, including Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. In Hollywood, by contrast, his career faltered somewhat after Becky Sharp, at least commercially, at the end of the 1930s. He was brought to Columbia Pictures to direct the screen adaptation of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, the first work of the radical company called the Group Theater to be translated to the screen — it was a commercial failure, despite the presence of Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou in that seeming bread-and-butter subject, a boxing drama. But he was back in command of the box office a year later with The Mark of Zorro (1940), starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, and Basil Rathbone, for 20th Century Fox; a success in its time, it is now regarded as one the finest of the big-studio swashbucklers. He followed that up a year later with his most dazzling visual creation, the drama Blood and Sand (1941), set against the background of 19th century Spanish bullfighting, and again starring Power and Darnell. Mamoulian’s use of color in that movie, influenced by the work of Goya, El Greco, and Murillo, was the most striking of his entire career.

For all of his success — and he had far more box-office hits than money losers, in the 1930s and also throughout his career — Mamoulian was the kind of talent that made the studio managements nervous. They loved the results he delivered, and appreciated his genius, but they also felt that he risked too much in terms of money, with his complicated shots and edits, and that his work was too experimental and too much on the cutting edge of what audiences would accept. In the 1930s, which were still boom times once the initial crisis of the Great Depression was past, that was all well and good, but during the Second World War, with austerity all around, and after the war (with the spectre of television hanging ominously over the business, and surveys indicating a precipitous drop in movie-theater attendance in the offing, regardless), the managements of the studios took a little less easily to his way of working. Additionally, from his earliest days on the Paramount lot as a director, he was known for his uncompromising nature and his willingness to rock the boat in pursuit of a creative goal, attributes that, even for someone successful, didn’t always leave him as the first choice for various projects, or an irreplaceable choice.

Mamoulian was to have directed Laura (1944) at Fox, but owing to a disagreement with producer Otto Preminger about a key element of the movie — the painting of Gene Tierney’s Laura Hunt that was to dominate the consciousness of one of the other key characters, and be the de facto centerpiece of many scenes — he ended up resigning and turning over the picture to Preminger to direct. Meanwhile, throughout the early ’40s, Mamoulian busied himself in theater, directing the original Broadway productions of Oklahoma!, Carousel (which earned him the Donaldson Award as Best Director of 1945), Sadie Thompson, St. Louis Woman, and Lost in the Stars.

With the exception of Summer Holiday (1948) — based on O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness — Mamoulian was officially absent from the screen for more than a decade, though in the midst of that period he did have one odd unofficial credit. In 1950, he was engaged by David O. Selznick to reshoot parts of a British film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger called Gone to Earth, starring Jennifer Jones and David Farrar; the two writer/producer/directors, best known for their film The Red Shoes, and their studio chief, Sir Alexander Korda, had gone into a co-production deal with Selznick, but the latter was unhappy with large sections of Gone to Earth and exercised his rights, pertaining to the U.S. release of the movie, to redo parts of it. The Mamoulian-reshot version (still credited to Powell and Pressburger, and never mentioning his name) was entitled The Wild Heart, and is usually treated as a separate cinematic entity from its British original. Michael Powell, for his part, always praised Mamoulian’s work on the reshot scenes and felt that if that was to be done, then Mamoulian was the best choice to do it, of any director in Hollywood.

In 1957, Mamoulian returned to Hollywood officially to direct Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and Janis Paige, the screen adaptation of what proved to be Cole Porter’s last stage success, a musical adaptation of Ninotchka. It was a hit — it was also his first film in Cinemascope, and it proved that he could work as inventively with the widescreen image as he had with the early sound film. Alas, it was also to be his Hollywood swan song. Mamoulian was engaged by Samuel Goldwyn to direct his movie adaptation of Porgy and Bess, and he did extensive planning on the film, but just before it was to begin shooting, a fire destroyed the carefully prepared sets, and disagreements between the director and Goldwyn forced him to bow out — to be replaced, as on Laura, by Otto Preminger, who stuck to Mamoulian’s shooting script. Mamoulian was also the original contracted director on the troubled production of Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, but pre-production disputes and budgetary problems forced him off of the picture, which eventually took three years to complete by other hands, in what became a notoriously expensive (and money-losing) production.

Mamoulian spent his last decades working on the stage, and writing — in 1964, he published a children’s book, Abigayil, The Story of the Cat at the Manger — while movies did not get better. As studio managements changed, he was forgotten, despite his unique record of successes, and it seemed to matter little to him. He busied himself writing and collecting books and paintings, playing music (he was a proficient violinist), and enjoying himself. He passed away in 1987, but his best movies continue to get revived and re-released on home video. Love Me Tonight, perhaps the finest of his films, is an example of filmmaking and storytelling on so many levels, in terms of visual and audio narrative, that it still awed viewers in the 21st century with its multi-level pleasures (and it is still regarded as a prime candidate for best musical ever made, some eight decades after its release). And both it and Applause proved they could still sell out theatrical screenings in 2007. Even his version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was long-suppressed by MGM after it bought out the rights for a remake starring Spencer Tracy, has acquired a new audience, following its re-release and rediscovery in the 1980s. —allmovie guide