Applause is a 1929 film directed by Rouben Mamoulian.
Kitty is a burlesque performer, dancing in naughty vaudeville for crowds of sleazy men. One night she collapses on stage, right in the middle of a number. A doctor is summoned and reveals that Kitty is pregnant. The film has already revealed that her lover is a gangster who is facing imminent execution.
Cut forward five years or so. The baby's father is long dead. Kitty is still jiggling for horny businessmen, but this time with a little girl, April, waiting backstage. A friend observes, probably correctly, that a traveling burlesque show is probably no place to raise a child. Kitty agrees, and sends April off to be educated at a convent.
Cut forward about a dozen more years. Kitty is now forty-ish and looking older, and also overweight, and also an alcoholic. All-in-all, she's about had it as a burlesque performer. She's currently shacked up with Hitch, a burlesque comedian, and also a lowlife scumbag who bleeds her of every nickel he can while also bedding almost every other dancer in the troupe. When Hitch finds out that Kitty has a teenaged daughter in private school, he browbeats her into yanking April out of school so that tuition money can go to him instead.
While April is happy to see her mother for the first time in three years, she is instantly grossed out by the lurid, seedy spectacle of 1920s vaudeville. She's also grossed out by Hitch, who plainly recognizes her as a younger, sexier version of over-the-hill Kitty. Kitty gives in to Hitch and April is put to work as a chorus girl, even though she hates it. Events take a turn, however, when April falls in love with a handsome sailor named Tony.
Tropes:
- Big Applesauce: The film gets a lot of mileage out of New York City, with scenes from the Brooklyn Bridge and Penn Station, as well as a scene where April and Tony enjoy the view of Lower Manhattan from a skyscraper.
- Bittersweet Ending: April has escaped the grasp of Hitch and the sleaze of burlesque and has found happiness with Tony. But her mother has killed herself.
- Burlesque: Kitty's job, to sing and dance in skimpy costumes. Kitty seems to be working in the low end of the already sleazy burlesque world, considering how hefty some of the chorus girls are, and how Kitty's still finding work despite being a 40-year-old drunk.
- Distant Prologue: An opening scene shows pregnant Kitty. Then after a brief scene showing Kitty and April some five years later, the rest of the movie is set later, with April a grown woman.
- Dramatic Irony: The last scene has Tony telling April that Kitty can live with them. An overjoyed April says, in the last line of the movie, "We'll always be together, all three of us. All three of us." What they don't know is that Kitty has died of a drug overdose inside the dressing room.
- Driven to Suicide: Rather than see April abandon a chance at happiness with Tony and become a burlesque girl to support her mother, Kitty kills herself by an overdose of sleeping pills.
- Epic Tracking Shot: The first talking films were stiff, dull affairs in which actors stood beside microphones hidden in plants or light fixtures or whatever, and recited their dialogue in front of stationary cameras. Rouben Mamoulian rejected this and insisted on a moving camera. So they put the camera on wheels. The result was a film with camera movements that weren't all that amazing when compared to silent cinema but were way beyond anything anyone else was doing in talking films in 1928 and 1929. One scene has the camera follow Kitty from the outer room of her apartment through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she gets her fatal dose of sleeping pills.
- Feet-First Introduction: The Leg Focus motif includes a scene where the camera is focused on April's calves as she leaves the dance hall. The camera stays down there as a man starts aggressively hitting on her. Then a third pair of legs comes into the scene as another man comes to April's protection. That's Tony, who becomes April's boyfriend.
- Horrible Judge of Character: In the backstory, Kitty had an affair with a criminal who wound up getting executed. In the present day, she's in love with Hitch, a slimy weasel who cheats on her with the chorus girls. She also completely misses Hitch's obvious lust for her daughter.
- Is There a Doctor in the House?: Said word-for-word when Kitty collapses onstage in the opening scene.
- Lady Drunk: Kitty is a sad wreck of an alcoholic, stumbling in drunk from all-night parties, desperately clinging to Hitch the scumbag even as he bleeds her dry.
- Leg Focus: A motif throughout the film. There are two different pans across the kicking legs of chorus girls, shots that are only intermittently fanservice-y given how husky some of the chorus girls are. But there's a shot focusing on April's smooth legs as she dangles them off the edge of her mother's bed. When Kitty calls Gus the producer looking for a job, Gus is shown flanked by the gorgeous legs of two different women.
- Male Gaze: Discussed and lampshaded. More than once, scenes of chorus girls or Kitty or April dancing are intercut with closeups of the faces of the men leering at them. April, who is disgusted by the whole burlesque scene, specifically mentions the "horrible men, leering at you."
- Match Cut:
- From Kitty fiddling with some beads that are presumably part of her costume, to a nun praying with a rosary at the convent.
- From April raising a glass to her lips as she eats with Tony, to Kitty lowering a glass from her lips to the table—the glass that held the fatal overdose of sleeping pills she just downed.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Almost word for word, as Kitty says "Oh my god, what have you done? What have I done?" She is reacting to news that April is breaking up with Tony in order to join the burlesque show full-time and support her.
- Someone to Remember Him By: April is the product of a love affair between Kitty and some kind of hoodlum who was apparently executed around the time April was born.
- Split Screen: Kitty is in her room singing "What I Wouldn't Do for That Man" (in Real Life a hit for Helen Morgan at that time). A Wipe starts then stops, dividing the image diagonally, showing poor dumb Kitty in one corner while Hitch is kissing another chorus girl in the other corner.
- Suicide by Pills: Rather than see her daughter April abandon a chance at happiness with Tony and follow in her footsteps by becoming a burlesque girl to support her, Kitty kills herself by overdosing on sleeping pills.
- Time Skip: Something like twelve years takes us from April going to the convent, to April returning to the convent.
- A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: After being told that she's all washed up in burlesque, and hearing that April has abandoned Tony and is going to become a burlesque performer to support her, Kitty kills herself by taking sleeping pills. What she never finds out is that Tony suggested that Kitty could live with them.
- White-Dwarf Starlet: Kitty can't accept the fact that she's a has-been. She has dreams of graduating from burlesque to legitimate theater, while in real life she's been reduced to stripping at stag parties.
