Show Boat is one of the greatest and most
influential musicals ever made. Based on a 1926 sprawling novel by Edna Ferber
that covers forty years in the lives of a few people who perform on a Mississippi
riverboat from the 1880s to the 1920s. She says she was very surprised when
Jerome Kern came to her and said he wanted to make her novel into a musical
but she eventually consented. The folks in the know say that Show Boat changed
musicals - until then they tended to be light comedies or scattershot affairs,
but Show Boat was a serious drama that explored a lot of themes with miscegenation
being the most controversial. It was produced by none other than Florenz
Ziegfeld who was one of the great impresario's of the time (and got his own
movie about him played by William Powell). He initially didn't really get
it and thought Old Man River should be cut. Thankfully they didn't listen
to him. The play went on Broadway in 1927 and included some of the greatest
songs in the Broadway musical canon - by Hammerstein and Kern - Old Man River,
Make Believe, Can't Help Loving Dat Man of Mine, You are Love, Bill and a
few others. The play was a huge hit and has been revived many times.
There have also been three film adaptation
of the musical/book. The most famous is the 1951 version with Howard Keel,
Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Agnes Moorhead, Joe E. Brown and William Warfield
as Joe. It is a wonderful film, I haven't seen the 1936 version but I should
with Irene Dunne, Paul Robeson and his classic rendition of Old Man River,
Hattie McDaniel and Helen Morgan. But until recently I had never heard that
there was a 1929 version - for good reason perhaps because it was considered
a lost film till it wasn't.
Because of the way the film was constructed
from bits and pieces there seem to be three main versions of it - a 90 minute
version, a 140 minute version and the 118 minute version that I saw that
was shown on TCM. Which makes reviewing it a bit iffy if there was 20-minutes
missing from this version - and which explains that when I read about it
I kept thinking to myself wait a second - I didn't see that. So this review
pertains to that version - I would love to come across the 140 minute version
one of these days. Not that this was scintillating but it was interesting
enough.
The timing of this film could not have
been worse - it began as a silent film and was based on the book and not
the musical - obviously since there was no sound! But then after the film
was finished sound showed up. Yikes what is a producer to do. So they went
back and reshot a few scenes with sound dialogue in them, added a little
music but not from the musical - but . . but then recorded some of the songs
from the musical and added them as a prologue before the film begins. This
version seems to have fewer than the 140 minute version. So this is a mishmash
of a film going from silent to sound and then to subtitles for scenes that
were done in sound but the audio track was lost! They clearly read their
lips for the subs.
I have not read the book so I have no idea
how it tracks to that but there are major differences to the 1951 version
- the main one being that the miscegenation sub-plot with Julie is totally
absent as is her man Steve though her most famous song is Bill. I forget
how that comes about. Other differences abound as well but again this may
have been the more accurate version. The plot I think is known to most people
- but maybe not. A married couple run a river boat and put on shows. The
star is their daughter Magnolia (Laura La Plante) but they keep going through
leading men because they all fall in with her and the severe ball twister
of a mother played by Emily Fitzroy who could scare children to behave or
crack mirrors with her looks fires them. She has an amazing resemblance to
Buster Keaton when he dressed up as a woman. Another leading man Gaylord
Ravanel (Joseph Schildkraut, who won an Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola
though he didn't play Zola but Dreyfus). The two of them elope and go to
Chicago where Ravanel's gambling either makes them rich or poor like a yo-yo.
Years pass. Shit happens.
I would say I appreciate this film more
than I enjoyed it. There are some great scenes and dramatic flourishes -
Schildkraut is dashing and handsome, La Plante admittedly less so to the
point where you can't help but wonder why all these men fall in love with
her. But that is a matter of personal taste. She was more a star in the silent
age for Universal which produced this film and retired soon after sound arrived.
