Open almost any history of the cinema or volume of criticism and the story is the same: high praise of [Mamoulian's] early films, total neglect of the later ones. Almost invariably, Mamoulian is valued chiefly as an innovator…. (p. 9)

Even Mamoulian himself seems to subscribe to the view that his films are important mainly because of their innovations and experiments. In interviews and in his comments made during personal appearances for a retrospective devoted to his work at the National Film Theatre in April 1968, he returns constantly to the same topics: the two separate sound channels mixed on a single track in Applause, the superimposition of Gary Cooper's voice over Sylvia Sidney's face in City Streets, the thunderous explosion accompanying the shattering of a vase in Love Me Tonight, the gradual suffusion of red over the screen during the Waterloo sequence in Becky Sharp. These technical advances, like...