Rouben Mamoulian, Reconsidered

At Harvard Film Archive,

Aug. 12-Sept. 2. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2016junaug/mamoulian.html

What a name, huh, Rouben Mamoulian? It’s like something out of a movie — even some of the movies Mamoulian directed over the course of one of the more interesting, and odder, careers in Hollywood history. He’s the subject of a full career retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive.

“Rouben Mamoulian, Reconsidered’’ starts Aug. 12, with the backstager “Applause’’ (1930), and ends Sept. 2, with Marlene Dietrich falling in love with Brian Aherne in “Song of Songs’’ (1933). In between come 14 other films. They include as buoyant a movie musical as there’s ever been (“Love Me Tonight,’’ 1932), a vehicle for one of the most celebrated closeups in movie history (of Greta Garbo, just being Garbo, for 40 seconds, at the end of “Queen Christina,’’ 1934), and one of the best screen adaptations of a Cole Porter musical (“Silk Stockings,’’ 1957).

Good luck using genre to assess Mamoulian (1897-1987). Besides musicals, melodramas, and that biopic, he made a gangster picture (“City Streets,’’ 1931), a boxing picture (“Golden Boy,’’ 1939), a swashbuckler (“The Mask of Zorro,’’ 1940), a bullfight picture (“Blood and Sand,’’ 1941), and literary adaptations. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’’ (1932) earned Fredric March a best actor Oscar in the dual title role. “We Live Again’’ (1934) comes from Tolstoy’s “Resurrection’’ (you’re better off reading the book). “Becky Sharp’’ (1935), based on Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair’’ (ditto), remains a cinematic landmark as the first three-color Technicolor feature.

Then there are the three famous pictures Mamoulian didn’t direct. He was fired from “Laura’’ (1944), “Porgy and Bess’’ (1959) — both times replaced by Otto Preminger — and “Cleopatra’’ (1962).

Mamoulian’s life was even more unusual than his filmography. How unusual? English was his seventh language. He was Armenian, though born in Georgia (the one in the Caucasus). Akim Tamiroff appears uncredited in “Queen Christina’’ and as the villain in “High, Wide and Handsome’’ (1937), a musical about oil prospecting in Pennsylvania (speaking of unusual) with a score by Jerome Kern. Between takes, did Tamiroff and Mamoulian swap tales of Tbilisi?

Mamoulian studied at the Moscow Art Theatre; worked with Konstantin Stanislavsky, the legendary theater director and acting theorist; and, after coming to the United States, directed the world premiere stage production of “Porgy.’’ Adapted from DuBose Heyward’s novel, it later became “Porgy and Bess.’’ Mamoulian directed the first production of that, too, in 1935 — and, eight years later, the first production of “Oklahoma!’’

“Oklahoma!’’ was the first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, marking an end to Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s partnership. It was Rodgers and Hart who wrote the music and lyrics for “Love Me Tonight.’’

Mamoulian’s career affords many pleasures. He was awfully good at hokum. That’s no back-handed compliment for a Studio Era director. Movies like “The Gay Desperado’’ (1936), “Golden Boy,’’ “Blood and Sand,’’ and, especially, “The Mark of Zorro’’ are even more entertaining than they are silly. That’s saying a lot. A consistently light tough marks middle period Mamoulian.

Lightness of touch is the least of the multitudinous virtues of “Love Me Tonight.’’ “Busby Berkeley’s large-scale numbers never moved me,’’ Vincente Minnelli once said of his early days in Hollywood. “I’m only interested in musical stories in which one can achieve a complete integration of dancing, singing, sound, and vision. I would often look at Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight,’ as it was such a perfect example of how to make a musical.’’

Perfect, if also preposterous. Maurice Chevalier is a tailor who goes to a chateau to dun an aristocratic client. Mistaken for an aristocrat himself (of course he is), Chevalier falls in love with Jeanette MacDonald’s princess (of course he does). It’s the sort of movie where much of the dialogue is in rhyming couplets; marching soldiers sing “Isn’t It Romantic?’’; a swooning swain tumbles from a ladder and declares “I fell flat on my flute!’’; and McDonald sings “Lover’’ as she drives a carriage drawn by galloping horses.

In other words, “Love Me Tonight’’ is a movie not quite like any other, though it owes an obvious debt to Ernst Lubitsch and his legendary “touch.’’ It also winks at screwball comedy, as when Myrna Loy’s man-hungry viscountess laments “Can’t we ever get a footman under 40 in this place?’’ That’s footman as in footsie.

Mamoulian plays some footsie of his own, using both sped-up and slow-motion footage, and opens the movie with a kind of visual overture of Paris that’s so effortless it’s easy to overlook how dazzling it is.

That opening exemplifies what Mamoulian meant when he told an American Film Institute seminar in the 1970s, “My interest in the camera was always in the marvelous things you can do with it — with the angles, the dollying, the dissolves, the props, and with the framing.’’ He was not unlike Orson Welles, another young stage genius who came to Hollywood eager to exploit the possibilities the cinema offered.

Consider Mamoulian’s filmmaking debut, “Applause.’’ Its tale of a burlesque queen and her convent-raised daughter is bathos on stilts. Visually, it’s technique on parade. Mamoulian includes overhead shots, tracking shots, zooms and reverse zooms, even split screen. There’s an extended dream sequence done in double exposure, as well as multiple New York location shots (Pennsylvania Station, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Times Square subway station).

The innovativeness of Mamoulian’s films takes different forms. All the killings in the hard-nosed “City Streets’’ occur offscreen. Mamoulian uses point of view to open “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’’ and the transformation scenes are very nearly psychedelic. (That Fredric March’s Hyde looks like Charles Bronson in a world without dentists is happenstance.)

In “Becky Sharp,’’ Mamoulian revels in the chromatic possibilities afforded by Technicolor. Everything seems keyed to lavender — except for the fire-engine red of the British officers’ tunics. These soldiers really were redcoats. He uses Technicolor more subtly, and to far richer effect, in “Blood and Sand.’’

“The Gay Desperado’’ opens with a movie-within-a-movie, a meta touch that seems at least three decades ahead of its time. Even “Silk Stockings’’ offers an innovation, of sorts: the sight of Peter Lorre singing and (kind of) dancing.

So how is it that Mamoulian remains so little known today? An “innovator who runs out of innovations,’’ Andrew Sarris calls him in “The American Cinema.’’ Sarris assigns him to the Less Than Meets the Eye category in his directorial hierarchy. That category also includes John Huston, Carol Reed, and Billy Wilder, so Mamoulian’s not in such bad company. But it’s true that after that first burst of inventiveness the work becomes less and less distinctive. And even during his glory days, there’s that Lubitsch influence on “Love Me Tonight’’ and the way that in “Song of Songs’’ he’s trying (and failing) to do Josef von Sternberg.

“Silk Stockings’’ is a remake of “Ninotchka’’ (Lubitsch again — with Wilder thrown in). It proved to be Mamoulian’s swan song. The briefly glimpsed director of the musical that Fred Astaire’s character is producing is a ringer for Mamoulian: round horn-rimmed glasses, prominent nose, slicked-back hair. The highlight of the movie is the sheer musicality of how he presents Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing to “All of You.’’ It’s simple, uncluttered, seemingly effortless. There’s still 40 minutes to go, but how nice to think of this as Mamoulian’s farewell to Hollywood. A lot of “Silk Stockings’’ is swollen and slow, in that ’50s MGM way, but here’s the old Mamoulian touch. Nothing’s more innovative than perfection.

Rouben Mamoulian, Reconsidered

At Harvard Film Archive, Aug. 12-Sept. 2. hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2016junaug/mamoulian.html

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.