Shanghaied from stage to screen, Rouben Mamoulian crams his debuting talkie with enough innovative clutter to make the most dedicated historian yearn for the bolted-to-the-floor setups of, say, Lights of New York, for some breathing room. Rarely still, the camera floats through the streets as marching bands trumpet the arrival of the burlesque show, hoochie-coochie queen Helen Morgan headlining a chorus of pudgy wrigglers for the constantly shifting lens angles. Overhead shot segues into close-up and then into point-of-view shot, and Morgan's baby girl is born, sent away from vaudeville squalor at a convent before being called back into the Stella Dallas plot as virtuous teenager Joan Peters. Little is left alone by Mamoulian's voraciously grabby inventiveness -- a quarrel in a seedy room is imagined as shadow theatre, Peter's first glimpse into mommy's stage tawdriness turns into frenzied Soviet montage, and a diagonal line slices the screen into twin triangles, one for Morgan serenading a slick lover's picture, the other for said lover (Fuller Mellish Jr.) squeezing a chorus tart down the hall. No less tricked out, Mamoulian's soundtrack doting verges on the supersonic, cacophonies concocted out of music-hall chatter, honking streets, and yapping dogs, yet registering the single drop of a coin. Strange how the overdosing tracking of the camera can't match the simplicity of the long takes, where the effect is one of emotion stretching like taffy between mother and daughter, between an uppity ingénue and a sailor suitor (Henry Wadsworth) overlooking the New York City skyline. Above all is Morgan's breathless emotionalism, majestically pathetic and as niftily hardworking as Mamoulian's pirouettes, sprawled on the floor while the show-must-go-on denouement ushers in dozens of sobbing imitators. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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