Show Boat

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Show Boat
French film poster
Directed by	George Sidney
Produced by	Arthur Freed
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 William Warfield
Music by	Jerome Kern
Cinematography	Charles Rosher
Editing by	John D. Dunning
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	September 24, 1951 (1951-09-24)
Running time	107 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$5.2 million (US)[1]

Show Boat is a 1951 Technicolor film based on the musical by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (script and lyrics) and the novel by Edna Ferber.

Filmed previously in black-and-white by Universal in 1936, the Kern-Hammerstein musical was remade in 1951 by MGM, this version starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel, with Joe E. Brown, Marge Champion, Gower Champion, William Warfield, Robert Sterling, Agnes Moorehead and Leif Erickson. None of the members of the original Broadway cast of the show appeared in this version, and Helen Morgan (the original Julie), Jules Bledsoe (the original Joe), and Edna May Oliver (the original Parthy), had already died by the time of this film's release (both Morgan and Bledsoe died before they reached fifty).

The 1951 film version of Show Boat was adapted from the original 1927 stage musical by John Lee Mahin after Jack McGowan and George Wells had turned in two discarded screenplays, 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: one of MGM's most popular musicals, it was the third most profitable film of 1951.

Although arguably one of the studio's less inventive film musicals, the film is more overtly cinematic than the 1936 version — the boat is seen winding its way down the river several times, and there are two scenes in which the boat is shown leaving the dock, while the 1936 film version is so faithful in following the stage play that the boat is seen moving only at the very beginning of the film, when it arrives at a river town.

The staging of several of the songs is more elaborate than in the 1936 version.

• In the 1936 film, Magnolia and Ravenal sing the song "Make Believe" just as they do in the stage version of the musical, with Ravenal standing on a river piling and Magnolia standing on the upper deck of the boat, in the manner of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. He does not even enter the boat until during the later "miscegenation" scene, just as he does in the stage version. In the 1951 film, Ravenal climbs on board the boat as soon as he first walks up to it, and then meets Magnolia for the first time. He follows her to the upper deck to sing the song, and the two walk around the deck while singing the last few lines.
• When Julie and several other characters sing "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" in the 1936 film, they sing it inside the boat, in the kitchen, (just as in the stage version) with only the last moments of the song being sung on the deck. In the 1951 film, the song is sung entirely on the ship's upper deck, taking full advantage of the surrounding scenery. The boat's kitchen is never shown in the 1951 film.
• In the 1936 film, just as in the stage version, Joe and the other dock workers sing "Ol' Man River" while sitting on crates and cotton bales on the levee, and the song is made cinematic through the use of an elaborate expressionistic montage of levee workers performing their tasks. In the 1951 film, part of the song is sung by Joe standing on the boat's lower deck as it winds its way down the river.
• In the 1936 film, when Julie sings "Bill", she stands next to a piano and never changes her position. (She sat on top of the piano in the stage version.) In the 1951 film, Julie walks around the piano while singing it and leans against the steps of the Trocadero nightclub to sing part of the song.

However, in the 1936 film, the staging of the show boat parade in the opening scenes was more elaborate than in the 1951 version. In the 1951 version, the parade members (as well as the actors) stay on the dock, while in the 1936 version, the parade is shown marching down the main street of the town, a huge set constructed by the Universal Pictures craftsmen. The introduction of the show boat company to the crowd is also held there.

The 1951 film was the first film version of Show Boat not to feature Robert Russell Bennett's stage orchestrations in one form or another (the orchestrations in this film were done by Conrad Salinger, Alexander Courage, and the uncredited Robert Franklyn).

Adaptation

For the 1951 "Show Boat", Oscar Hammerstein II's dialogue was almost completely thrown out and new dialogue written by John Lee Mahin. The only two scenes to retain more than a tiny bit of Hammerstein's dialogue were the scene in which Cap'n Andy introduces the show boat actors to the crowd, and the miscegenation scene, in which Julie (Ava Gardner) is revealed to be of mixed blood and therefore illegally married to a white man. 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. Kim (Magnolia and Ravenal's daughter) appears only as a baby and a little girl in this version.

Nearly all of the purely comic scenes, retained in the 1936 film version, were removed in the 1951 film, as much of the comedy in the show has no direct bearing on the plot, and according to the book The Great Movies by William Bayer, producer Arthur Freed maintained a strict policy of removing everything in a stage-to-film adaptation of a musical if it did not advance the storyline. Two additional comic moments not in the show had been added to the 1936 film and might be considered somewhat politically incorrect today. They were not used in the 1951 film. This pruning 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 relatively serious song-and-dance team rather than a comic team who happened to dance. Frank and Ellie, rather than being portrayed as unsophisticated, barely talented "hoofers" as in the show, were made into a rather debonair, sophisticated, and extremely talented couple in the style of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The role of ship's pilot Windy McClain, already brief to begin with, was reduced to just three lines in the film. (In the 1951 Show Boat, it is Magnolia, not Windy, who defends Julie and her husband Steve when the sheriff arrives to arrest them.)

The character "Rubber Face" Smith, a comic stagehand, was completely eliminated from the 1951 film.

The version of "Ol' Man River" heard here, and sung by William Warfield, is considered by film historians to be by far the best moment, both musically and pictorially, in the film. Musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger, who had many harsh words for the 1951 Show Boat in his 1977 book Show Boat: The History of a Classic American Musical nevertheless had nothing but high praise for this sequence. It was staged and directed by an uncredited Roger Edens during an illness of George Sidney, who directed the rest of the film. However, the "Ol' Man River" sequence in the 1936 film version of the show, with its tracking pan around the seated, singing figure of Paul Robeson, and its expressionistic montages of field and dock workers performing their tasks, is perhaps even more highly regarded.

The aspects of the original stage version dealing with racial inequality, especially the story line concerning miscegenation, were highly "sanitized" and deemphasized in the 1951 film, although the interracial subplot was retained:

• During the miscegenation scene (in which Julie's husband is supposed to suck blood from her hand so that he can truthfully claim that he has "Negro" blood in him), he is seen pricking her finger with what looks like a sewing pin and sucking it, rather than using an ominous-looking switchblade, as in the play and the 1936 film, to cut her hand with.
• The role of Queenie, the black cook (an uncredited Frances E. Williams), has been reduced to literally a bit part, and she practically disappears from the story after the first ten minutes, unlike the character in all stage versions and Hattie McDaniel in the 1936 film version. The role of Joe the stevedore (played by the then-unknown William Warfield) is also substantially reduced in the 1951 film, especially in comparison to Paul Robeson, whose screen time playing the same role in the 1936 film had been markedly increased because he was now a major star.
• In the 1936 version of 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, as is the term colored folks, which Queenie uses.
• Some of the more controversial lines of the song "Ol' Man River" (one of them being "Don't look up and don't look down; you don't dast make the white boss frown") 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. An offscreen, "disembodied" chorus is heard during "Ol' Man River", instead of the usual group of dock workers who are supposed to accompany stevedore Joe in the song. (The same type of chorus is heard later, in a choral reprise of "Make Believe" accompanying a montage which shows the increasing success of Magnolia and Ravenal as actors on the boat, and again at the end of the movie, in Warfield's final reprise of "Ol' Man River".)

The film also somewhat sanitized the character of Gaylord Ravenal, the riverboat gambler. In the Ferber novel, the original show, and the 1936 film, Ravenal can stay in town for only twenty-four hours because he once killed a man in self-defense — this is the reason he asks for passage on the show boat. This point was completely eliminated from the 1951 film, and the reason that Ravenal asks if the show boat will take him on is that he has lost his boat ticket through gambling. In the 1951 film, when Ravenal deserts Magnolia, he does not know she is pregnant, and returns when he finds out that she has had a child, while in the Ferber novel, the original show, the 1929 part-talkie film, and the 1936 film, he not only knows that she has had a baby, but deserts her several years after the baby has been born, knowing that she will probably have to raise the child alone.

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 shots of townspeople reacting to the show boat's arrival), the film does not give a very strong feeling of authenticity. The arrival of the boat was achieved by blending backlot footage showing the boat pulling in with location shots of crowds running along the river bank. (For backlot shooting, the lake used in filming MGM's Tarzan films stood in for the Mississippi River, while the real Mississippi was seen during the film's opening credits.) 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 featured 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.

Eleven numbers from the stage score were sung in this film. As in all productions of the musical, the song "After the Ball" was again interpolated into the story, but "Goodbye My Lady Love", another regular interpolation into the show, was omitted from this film version. Although the songs "Why Do I Love You?" and "Life Upon the Wicked Stage" were actually performed in the 1951 film after having been heard only instrumentally in the 1936 film, there were still several major musical differences from the original play in this Technicolor 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 dancing 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 just a few minutes after "Make Believe", was moved to a later 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. In the 1951 version, it is sung only twice, rather than being sung complete once and then partially reprised several times throughout the story, as in the play and the 1936 film.

• 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.

• Another little-known song, "C'mon Folks", originally sung by Queenie in the stage version in order to get the dock workers and their girlfriends to buy tickets to the play being presented on the boat, was turned into instrumental music for acrobats, seen in the background while Cap'n Andy chats with the three "cuties" that have accompanied him to the Trocadero New Year's Eve celebration.

• "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.

• The "Cakewalk", usually performed at the end of Act I by the black workers and the townspeople as part of the wedding ceremony, was instead performed twice in this film - once by Frank and Ellie on the show boat's stage while the "miscegenation sequence" is taking place backstage, and near the end of the film as a dance on that same stage for Cap'n Andy and his four year old granddaughter, Kim Ravenal.

The three additional songs that Kern and Hammerstein wrote especially for the 1936 film version were not used in the 1951 movie.

Cast

(credited cast only)

• Kathryn Grayson as Magnolia Hawks
• Ava Gardner as Julie LaVerne
• Howard Keel as Gaylord Ravenal
• Joe E. Brown as Cap'n Andy Hawks
• Marge Champion as Ellie Mae Shipley
• Gower Champion as Frank Shultz
• Robert Sterling as Steve Baker
• Agnes Moorehead as Parthy Hawks
• Leif Erickson as Pete
• William Warfield as Joe

Sheila Clark, who played Kim, Frances E. Williams, who played Queenie, Regis Toomey, who played the Sheriff, Emory Parnell, who played the Trocadero nightclub manager, and Owen McGiveney, who played Windy, were not billed at all, either in the film or in poster advertising for it.

Television

The film was first telecast in January 1972, on The NBC Monday Movie. This marked the first time that any production of Show Boat was telecast, with the exception of an experimental telecast of a scene from the 1929 film version in 1931. However, NBC never repeated the film. Several years later, the film went to CBS, where it appeared twice as a holiday offering on The CBS Late Movie. From there the film went to local stations and then to cable.

Songs (as listed on the Rhino Music soundtrack album)

• Main Title — MGM Studio Orchestra and Chorus ("Cotton Blossom" and an instrumental version of "Make Believe")
• "Cotton Blossom" - Cotton Blossom Singers and Dancers
• "Capt' Andy's Ballyhoo" - Danced by Marge and Gower Champion (MGM Studio Orchestra)
• "Where's the Mate for Me" - Howard Keel
• "Make Believe" - Kathryn Grayson / Howard Keel
• "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" - Ava Gardner
• "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" (Reprise #1) - Kathryn Grayson / Ava Gardner
• "I Might Fall Back On You" - Marge and Gower Champion
• Julie Leaves the Boat ("Mis'ry's Comin' Round" - partial) - MGM Studio Orchestra and Chorus
• "Ol' Man River" - William Warfield and MGM chorus
• Montage Sequence (Make Believe) - MGM Studio Orchestra and Chorus
• "You Are Love" - Kathryn Grayson / Howard Keel
• "Why Do I Love You" - Kathryn Grayson / Howard Keel
• "Bill" - Ava Gardner
• "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" (Reprise #2) - Kathryn Grayson
• "Life Upon the Wicked Stage" - Marge and Gower Champion
• "After the Ball" - Kathryn Grayson
• "Cakewalk" - danced by Joe E. Brown and Sheila Clark (MGM Studio Orchestra)
• "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" - (partial reprise by Ava Gardner, using her real singing voice)
• Make Believe" (Reprise) - Howard Keel
• Finale: "Ol' Man River" (Reprise) - William Warfield / MGM Chorus

Academy Awards

None of the film versions of Show Boat have won Oscars, and only the 1951 film was nominated — for photography (Charles Rosher), and for musical adaptation (Conrad Salinger, Adolph Deutsch). Likewise, the film Till the Clouds Roll By received no Oscar nominations.

Home media

As of 2008, this is the only film version of Show Boat to have been officially released on DVD (there is, as of now, only an apparently bootleg Brazilian DVD of the 1936 version, and no DVD of the 1929 film version). Warner Home Video, which owns the rights to all three film versions of Show Boat, announced some time ago that they would be officially releasing a remastered new set of the three films in 2008, but this turned out not to be the case. As of May 2012, Warners Home Video still has not released a three-film edition on DVD, although such an edition was released many years ago on laserdisc by Criterion.

Source

Kreuger, Miles: Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical (Oxford, 1977)

References

External links

• Show Boat at the Internet Movie Database
• Show Boat at AllRovi
• Show Boat at the TCM Movie Database