James Whale (1936)
This was the second Hollywood version of the stage musical Show Boat, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein from Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel of the same name and first produced on Broadway by Florenz Ziegfeld the following year. The first Show Boat movie, in 1929, was a part-talkie, part-silent from Universal. The producer, Carl Laemmle, was unhappy with this hybrid and wanted a second bite at the cherry, in the form of a full sound picture. Although a subsequent 1951 Technicolor remake fared well enough at the box office, James Whale’s version is widely regarded as the pick of the three Show Boat films to date. This is due in no small part to the enduring impact of Paul Robeson’s rendition of ‘Ol’ Man River’.
Robeson plays Joe, a manual labourer on the Mississippi. The character features in Ferber’s novel but Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, with whom he collaborated on the song score, expanded the role for their stage show, with Robeson specifically in mind. He wasn’t available for the original Broadway production but he did play Joe on the London stage in 1928 and in a Broadway revival of 1932, prior to Whale’s Show Boat. Joe is a contradictory conception. The characterisation of him in the opening dialogue with his wife Queenie – and, later on, in their duet ‘Ah Still Suits Me’ – is racist and demeaning: Joe is a black lazybones. His wife, a cook, is played by Hattie McDaniel, the definitive Mammy figure – so racial stereotypes are very much the order of the day. Yet in between his exchanges with Queenie, Joe launches into the august lament ‘Ol’ Man River’, whose lyrics affirm the trials of life from a specifically ‘darkie’[1], and an impassioned, point of view.
The boat of the title is the Cotton Blossom, home to the personnel of a travelling show that provides entertainments, in the form of vaudeville and melodrama, to river-town audiences on ports of call along the Mississippi. At the heart of the story, which begins in the 1880s and ends in the mid-1920s, are the Hawks family – the showboat impresario Cap’n Andy (Charles Winninger), his bossy wife Parthenia (Helen Westley) and their daughter Magnolia (Irene Dunne), who becomes the star of the show after the departure of Julie LaVerne (Helen Morgan), the company’s leading lady and Magnolia’s mentor. When Julie, who passes herself off as white, is revealed to be of mixed race, she and her white husband Steve (Donald Cook) stand accused of breaking the state law that forbids interracial marriage. About to be confronted by the police, Steve cuts his wife’s hand and puts his mouth to the wound, in order to claim truthfully that he too has non-white blood in him. This dramatic gesture, in combination with the support of Magnolia and others, is enough to get the police off Julie and Steve’s backs but the showboat management parts company with them soon after.
By this stage, ‘Ol’ Man River’ has been performed. Its power resides principally in Paul Robeson’s commanding voice but also in the chorus and images of Joe and other black stevedores, as they plant cotton, tote that barge and lift that bale. The impression made by this, and by the miscegenation theme, is so strong that, for twenty-first-century viewers at any rate, they overpower Show Boat’s main plot line, centred on Magnolia Hawks’s romance with and marriage to the charming, incorrigible gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Alan Jones). The racial elements also upstage the onstage and backstage ones, and not only in sequences where the latter directly reflect the former – as when Magnolia performs ‘Gallivantin’ Around’ in blackface. For similar reasons, the brief reappearance of Julie, now an alcoholic and deserted by Steve, matters more than the progress of Magnolia’s performing career.
Even so, the quality of the songs – including ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’, ‘Only Make Believe’ and ‘Bill’ (for which P G Wodehouse wrote the original lyrics, reworked by Hammerstein) – and the cast’s energy do more than carry Show Boat along. To modern eyes, the film looks technically primitive but that’s rather an effective means of portraying showboat theatre – which flourished from the early 1800s and, after the major interruption of the Civil War, enjoyed a renaissance in the last decades of the century – as a now-vanished popular art form. James Whale is excellent throughout at orchestrating crowd scenes, from the opening excited rush of locals to greet the arrival of the Cotton Blossom to volatile audience reactions at a New Year’s Eve entertainment, where nervous but eventually triumphant Magnolia is an eleventh-hour replacement for the indisposed Julie.
Paul Robeson isn’t the whole show. Irene Dunne shows plenty of musical-comedy resource and versatility, though she tends to be a bit noble when Magnolia is suffering. Alan Jones is too bland to convince as a charismatic gambling addict but he sings beautifully. So does Helen Morgan, an unusual and arresting presence as Julie. Her facial movements are oddly slow: Julie seems somehow freighted with melancholy and regret. (Morgan was herself to die after a long struggle with alcoholism, aged only forty-one.) There are enjoyable performances from Charles Winninger, Helen Westley and Sammy White, as a comic and dancer in the Hawks company. Magnolia and Gaylord have a daughter, Kim. As a child, she’s played eagerly and hyper-competently by Marilyn Knowlden. Kim is duller as a teenager and young woman (Sunnie O’Dea) but that doesn’t stop her following in her mother’s theatrical footsteps.
In terms of the time it takes on screen, Kim’s rise to stardom on the New York stage is meteoric, to say the least. This is one of those pictures where it looks as if the film-makers were suddenly told the studio would be closing in ten minutes’ time and they’d have to wrap everything up that quickly. Perhaps James Whale means to illustrate in the closing stages that, by the mid-1930s, cultural memory is already forgetting that the lavish Broadway musicals of the preceding decade had their roots in relatively rough-and-ready showboat entertainments of bygone days. If so, he makes the point more emphatically than may have been intended: ‘Ol’ Man River’ is reprised at the very end but only for a few seconds. That does, though, have a striking dual effect. On the one hand, it confirms the film’s tendency to downplay its racially charged aspect. On the other, it suggests that, in spite of that tendency and pace the lyrics of Show Boat‘s classic song, the African Americans on the Mississippi can’t quite be forgotten – even if Hollywood would prefer it that way.
20 December 2019
[1] In Whale’s film, that word replaced the N-word in the original show lyrics:
‘Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folks play …’
