A theater director who made fourteen of his sixteen films between the years 1929 and 1942, Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987 ) was a pioneer in the use of sound, visual effects and color. He would make his debut with the backstage tragedy Applause (1929), invented the interior monologue of 1931's City Streets, though Sergei Eisenstein had the precise idea for his unmade version of An American Tragedy - experimented with taut close-ups and color filters to effect the protagonist's transformation in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932) was among the most inventive of early musicals, symphonically blending sounds, music and words. Becky Sharp (1935) would utilize the newly available three-color Technicolor with restraint and added color as the film progresses, whereas the bull-fighting escapades of Blood and Sand (1941) was anti-realist in the manner of its derivation from the noted Spanish painters El Greco and Velazquez.
Mamoulian's last film - Silk Stockings (1957) was a musical remake in color and wide-screen of the earlier Ninotchka (1939), with the obligatory romantic development expressed in the dancing of its leads - Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. It reveals the director was still at the height of his powers, making one regret that his primary career scarcely outlasted the Thirties.