Show Boat (film)

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Show Boat is the name of three musical films based on the stage musical of the same name by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II(script and lyrics) and the novel by Edna Ferber. The song Bill featured lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse, and the original show featured two non-Kern songs, Goodbye, My Lady Love and After the Ball. For more about the musical and the plot see: Show Boat.

Contents

[edit] Musical numbers

Show Boat is a cornucopia of famous, favorite songs -- songs that many people today do not realize first appeared in this musical. The score includes:

  • Cotton Blossom
  • Where's the Mate For Me
  • Make Believe
  • Ol' Man River
  • Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man
  • Mis'ry's Comin' Round (only partially sung, until the 1988 3-CD set and the 1994 stage revival restored the whole song)
  • Till Good Luck Comes My Way
  • Life Upon The Wicked Stage
  • I Might Fall Back On You
  • C'mon, Folks (Queenie's Ballyhoo)
  • You Are Love
  • At the Chicago World's Fair
  • Why Do I Love You?
  • Bill
  • Goodbye, My Lady Love (by Joseph Howard)
  • After The Ball (by Charles K. Harris)

Kern and Hammerstein wrote an additional song for the original London production of the show in 1928, Dance Away the Night. While always used in London productions of the show, the song has never been heard in an American production.

There are also three songs written by Kern and Hammerstein for the 1936 film version:

  • I Have The Room Above Her (a duet for Magnolia and Ravenal)
  • Gallivantin' Around (a blackface number sung onstage by Magnolia)
  • Ah Still Suits Me (a duet for Joe and Queenie, written especially to expand both their roles)

And there is a song written especially by Kern and Hammerstein for the 1946 Broadway revival, Nobody Else But Me, written for Kim (Magnolia's daughter). It is the last song Kern ever wrote.

[edit] Film versions

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Show Boat has been made into a movie three times, unless one counts the mini-version seen in Till the Clouds Roll By as a film version of the show.

[edit] 1929 Version

Show Boat
Directed by Harry A. Pollard
Produced by Carl Laemmle
Written by Edna Ferber (novel)
Charles Kenyon (continuity)
Starring Laura La Plante
Joseph Schildkraut
Music by Joseph Cherniavsky
Cinematography Gilbert Warrenton
Editing by Daniel Mandell
Country Flag of United States United States
Language English
IMDb profile

Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat was filmed in 1929 by Universal Pictures, with a censored story line. The 1929 film is not really a version of the musical at all; its plot line sticks much closer to the novel than to the stage production, but is not as controversial as either one. The interracial love story between Julie and her husband Steve, the section of Ferber's novel that made the musical version so unusual for its time, was dropped to appease censors and Southern audiences in the 1929 film. However, just as in the Ferber novel, both Cap'n Andy and Parthy die, something that does not happen at all in the musical, in which no one dies. The 1929 film version stars Laura La Plante, Joseph Schildkraut, Otis Harlan, Emily Fitzroy, Alma Rubens, Elise Bartlett, Stepin Fetchit, and Jack McDonald. It was adapted by Charles Kenyon, Harry A. Pollard, and Tom Reed and was directed by Pollard.

It was made as a silent film, but the studio panicked when they realized that because of the coming of sound, audiences might be expecting a talking picture version of the novel. To safeguard against this, several scenes were then reshot to include about thirty minutes of dialogue and singing. Because of the success of the stage musical, which was playing on Broadway at the same time that the film was being shot, a two-reel sound prologue, featuring several members of the stage cast singing five songs from the show, was also added. Three of the songs heard in this prologue were not heard in the film proper. Most of the original stage score was replaced by both spirituals and popular songs written by other songwriters, and it was not a success.

This was the only film version of Show Boat to be given a road show presentation, and the only one of the three film versions to run over two hours (the stage version ran three hours originally, and was filmed in 1936 and 1951 at a length of slightly less than two hours).

The 1929 movie was long considered a lost film, but most of the film has since been recovered, although large portions of the sound track are still missing as of 2006. What has so far been recovered of the film turns up on television very occasionally, on Turner Classic Movies.

[edit] Cast

[edit] 1936 Version

Show Boat
Directed by James Whale
Produced by Carl Laemmle Jr.
Written by Edna Ferber (novel)
Oscar Hammerstein II
Starring Irene Dunne
Allan Jones
Music by Robert Russell Bennett
Cinematography John J. Mescall
Editing by Bernard W. Burton
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date(s) 1936
Country Flag of United States United States
Language English
IMDb profile

The 1936 film version is an adaptation of the famed Broadway musical version of the novel, also from Universal. Magnolia Hawks is an eighteen-year-old on her family's show boat, the Cotton Blossom, which travels the Mississippi River putting on shows. She meets Gaylord Ravenal, a charming gambler and 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 ten 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, but is reunited with the repentant Ravenal after twenty-three years. In a parallel plot, Julie LaVerne (the showboat's leading actress, who is part African-American, but "passing" as white) is forced to leave the boat because of her background, taking Steve Baker (her husband, to whom, under the state's law, she is illegally married) with her. Julie is also abandoned by her husband, and she consequently becomes an alcoholic, from which she presumably never recovers. But she enables Magnolia to become a success on the stage in Chicago after Ravenal has abandoned her.

This film version of "Show Boat" stars Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Queenie Smith, Sammy White, Donald Cook, Arthur Hohl, and Hattie McDaniel, and was directed by James Whale, who tried to bring as many people from the stage production as he could to work on the film. Winninger, Morgan and White had all appeared in both the original 1927 stage production and the 1932 stage revival. 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 understudied Magnolia on Broadway and toured the U.S. in the role. The 1936 film enlisted the services of the show's original orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, and its original conductor, Victor Baravalle. The screenplay for the film was written by Hammerstein.

The 1936 version of "Show Boat" is considered by nearly all film critics to be one of the classic film musicals of all time, and one of the best stage-to-film adaptations ever made. Ten numbers from the stage score are actually sung (with three others heard only as background music). Except for the final sequence and three additional songs written especially for the film by Kern and Hammerstein, it follows the stage musical extremely closely, unlike the 1951 version released by MGM. It also retains much of the comedy in the show. 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 we see Kim starring in, and which was intended to highlight African-American contributions to dance and music. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was successful at the box office, but was withdrawn from circulation after MGM bought the rights so that they could film their own remake. The controversy surrounding Paul Robeson's supposed Communist leanings further assured that the 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 it now turns up from time to time on Turner Classic Movies, though not as often as the 1951 remake.

In 2006 this version of Show Boat ranked #24 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals.

[edit] Cast

[edit] 1946 - The Version Seen in "Till the Clouds Roll By"

A significant but miniaturized rendition of the show has been included in MGM 's 1946 movie Till the Clouds Roll By, which tells a fictional story of Jerome Kern's life. The Show Boat segment, which takes up the first fifteen minutes of a 137-minute film, is rather a medley of several of the songs, performed in costume and against stage sets, than an actual film version of the show. It is supposed to be a re-creation of the show's opening night on Broadway in 1927. The mulatto Julie character was played by Lena Horne, while Kathryn Grayson was Magnolia, Tony Martin was Gaylord and Virginia O'Brien was Ellie. African-American actor and baritone Caleb Peterson sang "Ol' Man River" in the Show Boat sequence, but Frank Sinatra reprised it in the movie's finale. Parts of this mini-rendition were later included into one of the That's Entertainment! compilation movies.

[edit] 1951 Version

Show Boat

French film poster
Directed by George Sidney
Written by Oscar Hammerstein II
Edna Ferber
John Lee Mahin
Starring Kathryn Grayson
Ava Gardner
Howard Keel
Joe E. Brown
Marge Champion
Gower Champion
Agnes Moorehead
Music by Jerome Kern
Cinematography Charles Rosher
Distributed by MGM
Release date(s) 1951
Running time 107 min.
Language English
IMDb profile

"Show Boat" was remade in 1951 by MGM in Technicolor, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown, Marge Champion, Gower Champion, William Warfield, Robert Sterling, Agnes Moorehead and Leif Erickson. It was adapted by John Lee Mahin, J.P. McGowan (uncredited), and George Wells (uncredited) and was directed by George Sidney. Filmed in the typical MGM lavish style, this version is the most financially successful of the film adaptations of the play, and is one of MGM's most popular musicals, though arguably one of the studio's less inventive ones. It was one of the first American productions of "Show Boat" not to feature Robert Russell Bennett's orchestrations (the orchestrations in this film were done by Conrad Salinger). Oscar Hammerstein II's dialogue was almost completely rewritten (by John Lee Mahin), the story was given a major overhaul near the end of the film and the changes are considered to make this version of the story quite distinct from other versions. Changes included keeping the characters of Magnolia and Gaylord significantly younger at the end than in the play, and the expansion of the role of Julie to give her character greater depth. Nearly all of the purely comic scenes were removed, as much of the comedy in the show has no direct bearing on the plot. This left Joe E. Brown (as Cap'n Andy) and Agnes Moorehead (as Parthy) with far less to do than they would otherwise have had, and turned the characters of Frank and Ellie (played by Gower and Marge Champion) into a dance team rather than a comic team who happened to dance.

The aspects of the original story dealing with racial inequality, especially the story line concerning miscegenation, were highly "sanitized" and deemphasized in this version. Queenie (an uncredited Frances E. Williams) is virtually a bit part, and she practically disappears from the story after the first ten minutes, unlike Hattie McDaniel in the 1936 version. (In the 1936 "Show Boat", as well as the stage version, Queenie remarks that it is strange to hear Julie singing "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" because only black people know the song, thereby foreshadowing the revelation of Julie's mixed blood. This remark is completely left out of the MGM version.) Some of the more controversial lines of the song Ol' Man River are no longer heard, and Queenie and Joe do not sing their section of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", as they do in all stage versions and in the 1936 film. There is no African-American chorus in the 1951 version, and the levee workers are not seen nearly as much in the 1951 film as in the 1936 one. The 1951 movie is also extremely glossy, smoothing over the poverty depicted more tellingly in the 1936 version, and despite some (brief) actual location shooting (primarily in the opening shots of townspeople reacting to the Showboat's arrival), the film does not give a very strong feeling of authenticity. Lena Horne was originally to have played Julie (after Dinah Shore and Judy Garland were passed over) as she had in the brief segment of the play in the 1946 Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By. but studio executives were nervous about casting a glamorous black actress in one of the lead roles, so Gardner was chosen instead. Gardner's singing voice was later dubbed by vocalist Annette Warren; her original rendition of one of the musical numbers appeared in the compilation film That's Entertainment! III and is considered by some to be superior to the version used in the film. Gardner's vocals were included on the soundtrack album for the movie, and in an autobiography written not long before her death, Gardner reported she was still receiving royalties from the release.

There were several major musical differences from the original play in this version:

  • The opening song, "Cotton Blossom", rather than being sung by the black chorus and by the townspeople who witness the show boat's arrival, was sung by a group of singers and dancers in flashy costumes filing out of the boat. This required the omission of half the song, plus a small change in the song's remaining lyrics.
  • "Ol' Man River", instead of being sung right after "Make Believe", was moved to a scene taking place in the pre-dawn early morning, in which Joe sadly watches Julie and her husband leave the boat because of their interracial marriage. Thus, the song became Joe's reaction to this event.
  • Because of the reduction of both Joe and Queenie's roles, as well as the absence of an African-American chorus, "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" became a song for only Julie and Magnolia, while the deckhands relaxing on the boat provided their own instrumental accompaniment, but did not sing.
  • "Life Upon the Wicked Stage", rather than being sung by Ellie to a group of worshipful fans curious about stage life, was moved to the New Year's Eve scene at the Trocadero nightclub, to be sung and danced by Ellie and Frank in the spot in which the two are originally supposed to sing "Goodbye My Lady Love".
  • The little-known song "I Might Fall Back On You", another duet for Ellie and Frank, was sung as a number on the stage of the show boat, instead of as a "character song" for the two to sing outside the box office, as originally written.
  • "Make Believe" is reprised by Ravenal when he returns at the end, rather than when he is saying farewell to his daughter just before he deserts her and Magnolia.
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