| Show Boat | |
| Director: | James Whale |
| Producer: | Carl Laemmle Jr. |
| Based On: | |
| Starring: | Irene Dunne Allan Jones Charles Winninger Paul Robeson Helen Morgan Helen Westley |
| Music: | Jerome Kern |
| Cinematography: | John J. Mescall |
| Editing: | Bernard W. Burton Ted Kent |
| Color Process: | Black and white |
| Studio: | Universal Pictures |
| Distributor: | Universal Pictures |
| Runtime: | 113 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $1,194,943[1] |
Show Boat is a 1936 American romantic musical film directed by James Whale, based on the 1927 musical of the same name by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, which in turn was adapted from the 1926 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber.[2]
Universal Pictures had filmed the part-talkie Show Boat which was released in 1929. Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, had been deeply dissatisfied with that film, and wanted to make an all-sound version of the musical. It was originally scheduled to be made in 1934, but plans to make this version with Russ Columbo as the gambler Gaylord Ravenal fell through when Columbo was killed that year in a shotgun accident, and production of the film was rescheduled. The film, with several members of the original Broadway cast, began principal photography in late 1935 and was released in 1936.
In addition to the songs retained from the stage production, Kern and Hammerstein wrote three additional songs for the film. Two of them were performed in spots previously reserved for songs from the stage production.
The musical's story spans about 40 years, from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. Magnolia Hawks (Irene Dunne) is an 18-year-old on her family's show boat, the Cotton Palace, which travels the Mississippi River putting on shows. She meets Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), a charming gambler, falls in love with him, and eventually marries him. Together with their baby daughter, the couple leaves the boat and moves to Chicago, where they live off Gaylord's gambling winnings. After about 10 years, he experiences an especially bad losing streak and leaves Magnolia, out of a sense of guilt that he is ruining her life because of his losses. Magnolia is forced to bring up her young daughter alone. In a parallel plot, Julie LaVerne (Helen Morgan) (the show boat's leading actress, who is part black, but passing as white) is forced to leave the boat because of her background, taking Steve Baker (Donald Cook) (her white husband, to whom, under the state's law, she is illegally married) with her. Julie is eventually also abandoned by her husband, and she becomes an alcoholic. Magnolia becomes a success on the stage in Chicago. Twenty-three years later, Magnolia and Ravenal are reunited at the theater in which Kim, their daughter, is appearing in her first Broadway starring role.
This film version of Show Boat stars Irene Dunne as Magnolia and Allan Jones as Ravenal, with Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Queenie Smith, Sammy White, Donald Cook, Hattie McDaniel, Charles Middleton, and Arthur Hohl. It was directed by James Whale, who tried to bring as many people from the stage production as he could to work on the film. (Florenz Ziegfeld, who died in 1932, had originally produced Show Boat onstage.) Winninger, Morgan and White had all previously played their roles in both the original 1927 stage production and the 1932 stage revival of the musical. Robeson, for whom the role of Joe was actually written, had appeared in the show onstage in London in 1928 and in the Broadway revival of 1932. Dunne had been brought in to replace Norma Terris, the original Magnolia, in the touring version of the show, and had toured the U.S. in the role beginning in 1929.[3] Francis X. Mahoney, who played the brief role of the comic stagehand "Rubber Face" Smith, had also starred in the original production and in the 1932 Broadway revival, and would repeat his role in the 1946 Broadway revival of Show Boat, two years before his death.
This film also enlisted the services of the show's original orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, and its original conductor, Victor Baravalle, as the film's musical director and conductor. The screenplay for the film was written by Hammerstein.
The songs were performed in a manner very similar to the original stage version, not counting the three new songs written for the film. Many of the show's original vocal arrangements (by an uncredited Will Vodery) were retained in the film. "Why Do I Love You?" had been filmed in a new setting—inside a running open-top automobile—but was cut just before the film's release to tighten the running time. It is featured in all stage presentations of Show Boat, and if performed in its entirety is a long song, running six minutes and forty seconds. There is no word on whether or not the film footage has survived.[4] According to a New York Times interview with Dunne, her rendition during the car ride was too jerky and her recording on a separate sound track too smooth, and the song was dropped.[3] A hint of it, though, remains underneath the dialog. The music of the song is heard in the automobile sequence, in an earlier hotel lobby scene, and in the scene in which Magnolia receives Ravenal's farewell letter.
Due to time constraints, Whale was forced to delete much of his ending sequence, including a "modern" dance number to contrast with the romantic, "Old South" production number featuring Kim, and which was intended to highlight black American contributions to dance and music. In order to condense many years' time into the final reel of the film, a number of montages were employed, and up-tempo and down-tempo excerpts of "Gallivantin' Aroun, arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, were used in place of dialog, or under incidental dialog. There was also to have been an additional reprise of "Ol' Man River", sung by Paul Robeson in old-age makeup as Joe, but this was deleted, and we never do see an aged Joe (or Queenie) in the film as released.
According to film historian Miles Kreuger in his book Show Boat: The History of a Classic American Musical, great care was taken by director James Whale to ensure a feeling of complete authenticity in the set and costume design for this film.
Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times called it "one of the finest musical films we have seen".[5] Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a mildly positive review, characterizing the direction as "fine moneyed smoothness", and describing the film as "good entertainment, sentimental, literary, but oddly appealing". Greene also commented that the film had seen criticism from other viewers that the ending had suffered from "the extreme sentimentality and improbability of [the final] reunion".[6]
It was the 8th most popular film at the British box office in 1935–36.[7]
Although the film was critically acclaimed and successful at the box office, it was withdrawn from circulation in the 1940s, after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which wanted to remake the film, bought the rights (and all prints) from Universal. MGM originally wanted to star Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the remake, but those plans fell through.[8] MGM's Show Boat did not begin filming until late 1950, and was released in the summer of 1951 with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel in the leading roles.[9]
The fact that Paul Robeson, who had played Joe in the 1936 version, was blacklisted in 1950 further assured that the 1936 film would not be seen for a long time, and it was not widely seen again until after Robeson's death in 1976. In 1983 it made its debut on cable television, and a few years later, on PBS. It was subsequently shown on TNT and now turns up from time to time on TCM.
In 2014, a restoration of the film became available on DVD in the U.S. as part of Warner Home Video's Archive Collection line;[10] and in 2020, a 4K restoration Blu-ray was released by The Criterion Collection.[11] [12]
Ten numbers from the stage score are actually sung, with four others heard only as background music, and a tiny, almost unrecognizable fragment of the song "I Might Fall Back on You" is heard instrumentally at the beginning of the New Year's Eve sequence. Except for three new dialogue scenes, the final ten minutes of the film, and the three additional songs written for the movie by Kern and Hammerstein, the 1936 Show Boat follows the stage musical extremely closely, unlike the 1929 film and the 1951 version released by MGM. It is so faithful that even several instrumental pieces not by Kern which are regularly included as part of the show's score are retained in the film. The film also retains much of the comedy in the show.
The three new songs written by Kern and Hammerstein for the 1936 film are:
In 1996, this version of Show Boat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[13]
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
Show Boat was made available on VHS beginning in 1990 (MGM/UA M301757). The Voyager Company, under its Criterion Collection Label, released two versions on laserdisc in 1989 of the 1936 version. One was a special edition with extras that included the history of show boats in general and its stage and film history, and the other was a movie only version. MGM/UA Home Video released the 1929, 1936 and 1951 versions, as well as the Show Boat sequence from Till the Clouds Roll By, as The Complete Show Boat collection on laserdisc in 1995.[17] The 1929 version was restored and this release is the most complete version available. The transfer for the 1936 version is the same as the Criterion Collection and the 1951 was from the restored stereo release MGM had done earlier.
A Brazilian company, Classicline, released a poor quality DVD version in 2003.
In February 2014, a restoration of the film became available on DVD in the U.S. as part of Warner Home Video's Archive Collection line.[10] The initial inventory will be filled by manufactured DVDs; subsequent inventory will be filled by DVDs-on-demand (DVD-Rs). Warner has since discontinued this edition.
In March 2020, Criterion released both a DVD and Blu-ray of this version, with footage from the 1929 version and commentary by Miles Krueger on both the feature film and the 1929 footage, both ported over from the CAV laserdisc release.[11] [12]