In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
James Whales’ 1936 film Show Boat is a lot of things, but above all it is an epic melodrama spanning more than 40 years, from the 1880s to the 1920s, and set among the performers and other workers on a Mississippi showboat.
Show Boat is also a musical, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (who also wrote the screenplay), based on a successful stage musical adapted from a 1926 best-selling novel by Edna Ferber, which was first performed on Broadway in 1926 and revived in 1932. As was expected of musicals at the time, it features extravagantly brilliant costumes and sets and is loaded with delightful music including standards like “Ol’ Man River” as well as a rather unfortunate blackface number, “Gallivantin’ Aroun,’” which was written specifically for the movie (I’m not sure why it was added, other than the fact it is presented in a show within the show, and blackface performances were popular in the period where most of the action takes place).
One thing Show Boat is not is realistic, but you can’t say you weren’t warned. Whale prepares the viewer for the unreality of what they are about to see with a brilliant opening credits sequence featuring moving cutout figures on a miniature set. He also draws attention to the fact that you are seeing a created object by mixing styles through the film, most notably in some expressionistic moments in the montage accompanying Paul Robeson’s performance of “Ol’ Man River” that are reminiscent of his work in the Universal horror films for which he is most famous. This version of Show Boat is not a filmed play but the material of a play re-imagined as a movie that uses everything movies can do to deliver the spirit of the original.
This meta-ness continues throughout the film, as scenes of the rehearsal and performance of melodramatic stage productions are fit within the melodramatic stories of the characters who are actors in those productions. This approach pays off most obviously in the famous scene in which the racial background of performer Julie Laverne (Helen Morgan in the other kind of blackface) is revealed and she and her white husband Steve (Donald Cook) are threatened with arrest for miscegenation, a moment of real heightened emotion set within a rehearsal of the artificially heightened emotion of a stage melodrama.
That scene is a big deal for another reason: the Hays Code banned the portrayal of interracial romance so Show Boat needed special permission to so much as mention that a white man and a racially mixed (or black by the “one drop” theory then in use) woman could be in love with each other. The same scene also highlights the arbitrariness allowing the right to marry be controlled by state law in a supposedly free country. As the point of a show boat is that it moves from one place to another, a marriage that is legal today could get you arrested tomorrow if you happen to have crossed the Maxon-Dixon line in the interim.
Several of the actors in Show Boat had extensive stage experience, including Charles Winniger who played Cap’n Andy Hawks in the original 1927 stage production of Show Boat as well as the 1932 stage revival, and was so identified with the role that he played variants of it in several other productions. Irene Dunne, who played the tragic leading lady Magnolia Hawks, had extensive stage experience including playing that role in touring production of Show Boat directed by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Paul Robeson played the role of Joe in the London premiere of Show Boat and had also performed in several other notable stage productions, including the first of his three performances of Othello (also in London) and in productions of The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillum Got Wings.
Show Boat was nominated for the Mussolini Cup (Best Foreign Film) at the 1936 Venice Film Festival and in 1996 was chosen for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. It was well-received upon initial release but wasn’t available to be seen for many years, having been withdrawn from circulation in the 1940s because MGM planned to make a new version (which didn’t happen until 1951). It may also have suffered from the fact that Robeson was blacklisted beginning in the 1950s, and at any rate it wasn’t widely available until it started playing on cable TV in the 1980s, followed by release on home video in 1990. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1021
Technical details: 113 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.37:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD
Extras: 1989 audio commentary by musical historian Miles Kreuger; 1989 video interview with James Whale biographer James Curtis; “Recognizing Race in ‘Show Boat’” video interview with professor Shana L. Redmond; award-winning short documentary “Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist” (1979) by Saul J. Turell; excerpts from the 1929 film version of Show Boat; two radio adaptations of Show Boat; booklet with essay by critic Gary Giddens
Fun Fact: James Whale identified this as his favorite among the many films he directed.
Parting Thought: The lyrics for “Ol’ Man River” have been revised many times, as certain words became considered offensive. The original lyrics included the n-word, with later substitutions including “darkies,” “colored folk,” and (I kid you not) “We” as in “We all work on the Mississippi…while the rich folk play.” Does updating the text amount to denial of the fact that at the time the song was written and first performed, racial discrimination was written into law and in which the n-word was considered acceptable on the Broadway stage?
