Director:
Harry A. Pollard
Year: 1929
Rating: 5.5
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.