Show Boat

A show boat works its way along the Mississippi from town to town. Magnolia, the captain's daughter, marries a gambler on board. Julie, another performer, is discovered to be Black, and since mixed marriage is illegal both she and her husband are put off the boat. Years pass, the gambler leaves and Magnolia is alone on stage. The subject is not the musical but how race law cuts across people's lives. Julie's story is the film's hardest passage and it is delivered with almost no softening, which is unusual for an American musical of 1936. The form moves between stage show and film. The songs are Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's; the best-known is Ol' Man River sung by Paul Robeson, and that sequence alone explains the film's place in cinema history. Its circulation is a separate story. MGM later acquired the rights and, having made its own remake in 1951, withdrew this version; it was unavailable for decades and only returned to circulation later. James Whale directs, a filmmaker known for horror, working entirely outside his territory. Irene Dunne plays Magnolia and Helen Morgan plays Julie. Who it is for: viewers curious about classic musicals and Robeson. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the period's racial representation troubling; in places the film carries the conventions of its time unaltered.