(This is the second part of a two-part column. Click here to read Part 1.)
On the stage, Hammerstein’s indecisive confrontation with racial questions literally begins with Show Boat’s very first word: it’s the forbidden n-word, sung by a Black chorus. The word is meant as a slap in the face to the luxurious “carriage-trade” audience: The curtain rises on Black laborers loading bales of cotton onto boats and singing, “[n-word]s all work on the Mississippi/ [n-word]s all work while the white folks play.” The word was in common use in 1927, so the thought probably never struck Hammerstein or his colleagues that what merely startled white spectators might register as a deeper offense to a nonwhite audience. The latter had largely not yet acquired the habit of patronizing Broadway shows in large numbers.
Over time, the offensive word got steadily softened: Whale’s film, presumably at the behest of the Production Code, changes it to “darkies,” possibly then thought to be marginally less offensive. Later recordings say “colored folks,” or literally whitewash the phrase into “Here we all work on the Mississippi.” After which, as Miles Kreuger sardonically points out in his definitive study of Show Boat’s history, a period set in during which the opening chorus was regularly cut, so that *nobody* worked on the Mississippi.
The original’s blunt opening assertion, however, was immediately blurred, in 1927, by the script’s first black-white encounter, since the Black character involved is Queenie—played in both the 1927 original and the 1932 revival by a white woman in blackface, as aforesaid, by Tess Gardella, listed in the program under her usual vaudeville billing as “Aunt Jemima.“ (In the 1932 road tour her role was taken by another blackface vaudevillian who went by the name “Mammy Jinny.”) Neither Hammerstein nor any of his colleagues seem to have had any problem with this piece of casting, nor to have noticed the odd disparity it made with a work in which other Black characters—notably Queenie’s husband, Joe—were being played by actual African-Americans.
The paradox of Gardella’s presence was intensified by the uses Hammerstein found for her character. In both stage script and screenplay, Queenie is given an exceptional freedom of speech and movement. Her encounter with the villainous Pete in the opening scene, when she refuses to tell him where she got the brooch Julie has given her, is startling for the time and place, setting the show boat folk markedly apart from the region’s residents. (In the 1928 London production, the role was cast with an actual African-American, the great blues singer Alberta Hunter, instead of a blackface performer.) In a later scene of the stage version, Queenie tells Cap’n Andy—her employer—that he doesn’t know how to attract a Black audience, and demonstrates by singing the “Ballyhoo.” Still later, when the stage version conveys the passage of time by having Queenie appear in a flapper dress to sing a 1920s-style song, “Hey, Fellah,” the image of a white woman in blackface singing and dancing for a Black man carries a buried impropriety for the era: The same woman doing the same dance without the black makeup would constitute a scandal. Interestingly, it echoes a parallel impropriety in the first act, where Magnolia, in “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” imitates the “plantation shuffle,” a Black dance she has seen the dock workers on the levee doing, and Joe, watching her, comments approvingly, “Look at dat gal shuffle!” (In the film, Whale cuts from Magnolia to the Black workers doing the same dance on the levee.) Joe’s exclamation, like Queenie’s assertiveness, demarcates the boat as a freer space for African-Americans than the surrounding world.
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” itself shows Hammerstein’s blurry mythologizing of racial matters from a different angle. The song—the refrain of which is in the standard 32-bar, AABA pattern of Tin Pan Alley—is presented as an instance of some musical code known only to Blacks, so that Queenie is surprised at Julie’s knowing it, and Magnolia’s assertion that “Julie sings it all the time” becomes a clue to the latter’s biracial heritage, foreshadowing her expulsion from the show boat. Although the verse sung by Queenie, as Gary Giddens points out in his essay accompanying the Criterion edition, is in a 12-bar blues pattern, Hammerstein’s categorizing of the song is frankly nonsensical, both because of the easily accessible melody itself and because the whole idea flies in the face of fact. While slavery time and its aftermath did produce songs whose lyrics contained encoded references to matters meant to be understood only by Black hearers, characteristically “Black” songs were widely disseminated in the mainstream. In fact, it was a principal grievance of Black artists that white performers and writers appropriated their musical and lyrical inspirations without giving due credit, a complaint that often went as far as accusations of outright plagiarism. A song that “nobody but colored folks” ever sang, as Queenie describes “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” would simply be a song that had not become popular—a patent absurdity in this particular case.
Under the circumstances, Hammerstein’s categorization of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” as a “Negro song”—the term Magnolia applies later, when she sings it for her Trocadero audition—makes no sense whatever. (And the matter is muddled even further when, after being taught to “rag” the song in her audition, Magnolia instead makes her Trocadero debut singing “After the Ball”—a virtual prototype of the white, genteel “parlor song.”)
The treatment of Joe as a character betrays a similar indecision on Hammerstein’s part, brought out to its fullest by Robeson’s powerful presence in the film. As a character, Joe has no redeeming qualities beyond his general amiability. He seems to embody the stereotype of the “shiftless Negro,” skilled chiefly at avoiding work, preferring to sit and whittle rather than relate to anyone or accomplish anything. (The additional song that Kern and Hammerstein wrote for Joe and Queenie in the movie, “I Still Suits Me,” virtually turns Joe’s indolence into a philosophy of life.) The lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” hardly seem to apply to him. “Let me go ’way from the white-man boss”? Joe’s white employer is Cap’n Andy, the most indulgent and benevolent soul around. Yet—when Joe sings “Ol’ Man River,” and most particularly when Robeson sings it, with his soulful eyes and rich, resonant tone, the song seems to lift him into spokesmanship. Whale’s camera swings around Joe, showing us the feet of passers-by on the levee, and then the strong, impassive river. The camera digresses, cutting to images of dock laborers and field hands. When it comes back to Robeson, we see the dock laborers gathering around Joe, listening to him and ready to sing along with this expression of a feeling they share. Unlike anything else in the film, the moment is huge. It evokes the towering images that make Eisenstein’s early Soviet films so memorable. We have moved far away from Hollywood, far away from Joe the indolent whittler. We have arrived at a moment when a man with a song can speak for a whole downtrodden people, when the bitter side of our country’s divisive history receives a devastating and lasting rebuke.
Yet this transcendent moment does not belong to the thread of Show Boat’s main story line. Like the rest of Joe and Queenie’s fragmentary story, like the Black stevedores whose work song opens the show (later becoming the verse of “Ol’ Man River”), and even like the tale of Julie’s departure and subsequent unseen sacrifice. These matters, adumbrating enormous issues, remain peripheral; we don’t see them whole. Even Magnolia’s story, once Ravenal is out of the picture, becomes cursory. We never learn what makes her a star (surely one successful night at the Trocadero wouldn’t suffice), or how Kim grows up to follow in her footsteps. In his screenplay for Whale, Hammerstein tried to fill in, or at least paper over, some of these gaps: We get a glimpse of Magnolia coaching Kim in a 1910s Kern-Wodehouse song (“Old-Fashioned Wife” from Oh, Boy!), and an amusing moment of a now-prosperous Andy and Parthy, in elegant evening clothes, while Andy haggles with a West End producer over Magnolia’s salary for her London debut. Most innovatively, and for some moviegoers irritatingly, Hammerstein invented a final page for Ravenal’s story that allowed the librettist to have his crowd-pleasing happy ending: A silver-haired Ravenal, still dapper-looking but clearly down on his luck, has become the stage-doorman of the theater where Kim is starring. Nicknamed “Pop” like all stage-doormen of the time, he gets bawled out by the company manager for constantly sneaking in to watch Kim rehearse when he should be minding the door. Of course Magnolia, when she arrives for the opening night, recognizes “Pop” instantly, and a momentary reunion follows.
While this ending may have sent 1936’s audiences home happy, it lacks the sentimental satisfaction of Hammerstein’s stage version, arbitrary as that is, because it fails to go back to the show boat. A quick shot of the river, with a voice-over of Joe singing the last phrase of “Ol’ Man River,” is all we get—a final punctuation mark rather than a full close. It reveals the extent to which Hammerstein, Kern, and even Whale did not fully grasp the massive size of their material. Partly this was an issue of time. Neither a normal theatrical evening (even one at Ziegfeld’s customary lavish length) nor the running time of a standard 1930s feature film had room to encompass the maturing of three generations of women, as Ferber’s novel does. And the elaborate sequence in which the creators had planned to show the influence of Black artists on the white entertainers of Kim’s generation was scrapped or left unshot.
Still, the movie, like its stage source, finds time for incidental diversions. In this context the two new songs Kern and Hammerstein added to the film for the white characters are worth examining. The first, the lovely “I Have the Room Above Her,” displays the (rather surprisingly tentative) development of Ravenal’s courtship of Magnolia, conducted clandestinely behind Parthy’s back. The song is a “charm” number that adds nothing beyond its appealing melody to a romance that we’ve seen burgeoning from the moment of Ravenal’s arrival on the show boat. (In the lyric, he excoriates himself for his shyness—“a lover more impetuous than I/ Would take his chance or know the reason why”—which hardly squares with the man whom we’ve seen, under the eyes of her parents, grab the lady and kiss her passionately.) The scene in which the song is embedded leads up to his full-throated declaration of passion in “You Are Love,” which does mark a step forward in the progress of the romance. Even so, the melodic delicacy of “I Have the Room Above Her” has lured several late-20th-century productions into adding it to the stage score, keeping tenors and audiences happy at the expense of dramatic development.
The added song for Magnolia, “Gallivantin’ Around,” is an even more anomalous case. Written in Black dialect, with a perky banjo tune that suggests the Tin Pan Alley “coon” songs of the early 1900s, it is performed in blackface, in what is presumably an “olio”—a variety entertainment, performed in front of the house curtain between the acts of, or as a postlude to, the evening’s melodrama. Its presence is quite puzzling: Parthy’s prejudice against allowing her daughter to act a role onstage has been emphasized, and it is hard to imagine her sanctioning Magnolia’s capering about in blackface. Then, too, it raises the question of how many performers the show-boat troupe carries. We only learn of four: Frank, Ellie, and the lead couple, played first by Steve and Julie, and then by Magnolia and Ravenal. The only other character seen as involved with the performance is the stage manager and sound-effects man, “Rubber Face” (Francis X. Mahoney).
This is an unusually small troupe even for a show boat. (Hammerstein has shrunk it further by merging the troupe’s “comedy man” or second lead with its villain, two separate characters in Ferber’s novel. Yet when Magnolia sings “Gallivantin’ Around,” the show boat’s stage is suddenly filled with a chorus of cavorting couples, as if Cap’n Andy were a second Ziegfeld. That Hammerstein should want to bring blackface back into the story’s aesthetic vocabulary, having disposed of it in Queenie’s case by casting a Black actress (Hattie McDaniel) in the role, and then writing her a song that displays her and Joe in a moment of comparative domestic tranquility (it is one of the few tender moments for two people of color in any American film of the studio era) should then want to fall back on the stereotype makes the number a total headscratcher. Irene Dunne performs it with a game sparkishness, however, and her extravagant playing supposedly inspired directors to cast her in “screwball” comedies like Theodora Goes Wild (1936) and The Awful Truth (1937), for both of which she received Best Actress Academy Award Nominations.
In interviews decades later, both Dunne and Jones said they felt Whale had been the wrong director for the material. This probably has to do more with the day-to-day sense of his “foreign-ness” on the set than with his actual results, which are substantial: for all its questionable and contradictory elements, the film packs a powerful force and gives powerful satisfactions. If you have any interest at all in Show Boat as a work, the film is required viewing and a permanent reference point. If your interest is purely that of a movie viewer looking for an interesting diversion, it constitutes a strong example of ’30s film style with several startling sequences and at the end—like so many other ’30s films—a bit of a scramble, easily forgivable.
The strength of the film comes largely from Whale’s insistence on casting performers who had experience of the show onstage, chiefly in the original Broadway production or its offshoots. The presence of Helen Morgan, singing “Bill” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” is a lambent touchstone of the work’s truth, girded by the sweet vulnerability of her acting. Charles Winninger’s Cap’n Andy, particularly in the big comic solo routine where he acts out the unfinished melodrama for the crowd, bears a similar stamp of truth: this is what Show Boat’s original creators wanted in this scene. Dunne, who had played Magnolia on the original’s national tour, and Robeson, who had played Joe in London in 1928 and on Broadway in 1932, were both making their presence felt strongly in American film for the first time. Eva Puck, the Ellie of the original production and the 1932 revival, had divorced her performing partner, Sammy White, the original Frank, after the revival closed, and so was not available to appear opposite him in the film. (In fact, some gentleman must have talked with reason, because after remarrying a wealthy executive, she gave up performing.) So White’s partner in the film is Queenie Smith, a popular Broadway comedy ingenue, best known for playing the title role in the Gershwins’ Tip-Toes. Smith, Helen Westley (the film’s Parthy), and Donald Cook (Steve) are the only principals with no prior stage connection to Show Boat. Hattie McDaniel had appeared in a West Coast production, and Allan Jones had sung Ravenal in several of the St. Louis Muny productions.
This roster is particularly notable because, in so much of Whale’s other film work, he seems to surround himself with his fellow emigre British artists wherever possible: R. C. Sherriff (with whose play Journey’s End Whale made his mark as a stage director), Benn W. Levy, and John Balderston were his preferred screenwriters; the notable performers in his other films include Colin Clive, Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt), Elsa Lanchester, Claude Rains, Ernest Thesiger, E. E. Clive, and Arthur Edeson. Whale worked well with American artists, who appeared in or made important contributions to many of his films, often side by side with the Britishers, but he was clearly more comfortable with artists from his home country. This makes Show Boat stand out all the more remarkably in his filmography: Its only major contribution by an English-identified artist is the costume design by Doris Zinkeisen, who, aside from being the toast of theatrical London for her designs of C. B. Cochran’s lavish musicals (including Cole Porter’s Nymph Errant and Noel Coward’s This Year of Grace), had been a fellow art student with Whale at the Royal Academy. Moreover, in addition to her stage design credits she had an international reputation as a muralist and portrait painter. And even in the design category, Whale found a place for a member of the original stage production’s creative team: The movie’s opening titles are set to a parade of animated paper cutouts of miniature figures wearing (or so Miles Kreuger reports) replicas of John Harkrider’s costumes for Ziegfeld’s original production.
If this seems as anomalous as many other aspects of the film, one has to remember that the film itself is an anomaly in Whale’s oeuvre: Though he worked in many genres, he is best remembered for having set what became the style for Universal’s box office record-breaking series of horror films, with works like Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Old Dark House (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). Darkly tragic mood pieces leavened with startling touches of dry British humor, they seem to be Show Boat’s antithesis in every imaginable way. Yet Whale apparently loved the project and threw himself into it with great enthusiasm, perhaps relishing the change of pace.
Ironically, Whale’s film, costly to produce, brought disappointing returns at the box office in 1936. Though treasured by connoisseurs for its truth to the original—particularly in its capturing of Robeson, Morgan, and Winninger in their career-defining performances—it tended to lie fallow and forgotten, while Show Boat, the stage musical, lived on in its various truncated or reconfigured editions. The giant, splashy, Technicolor film version produced in 1951 by MGM’s Arthur Freed unit largely replaced it in the general public’s mind. The many clumsy revisions and misunderstandings of that remake have been so often excoriated by film critics and musical-theater scholars that reiterating their many complaints would be superfluous. One can let its most glaring error stand as a quintessence: Freed, or somebody in MGM’s executive offices, was convinced that in the show boat era, any vehicle traveling the Mississippi must have been a paddle-wheel steamer. Accordingly, MGM’s Cotton Blossom was fitted out with a giant paddle wheel. No real show boat, however, ever had a paddle wheel; the steam engine that turned such a device would have to have occupied the central area where a show boat had its auditorium. Show boats were largely empty floating vessels, pulled or pushed along by a steam-powered craft colloquially called a tow boat. (Pete, the troublemaking figure who rats on Julie, is, until fired by Cap’n Andy, the engineer of the Cotton Blossom’s tow-boat.)
So MGM’s 1951 version of the story was set on a giant physical impossibility. Which may be why so many of its principals seem either demoralized or overwrought—although their problems are more likely to stem from George Sidney’s sluggish direction, John Lee Mahin’s relentlessly overexplanatory screenplay, or perhaps from the wince-producing garishness of Walter Plunkett’s costumes. Some showily acrobatic dancing by Marge and Gower Champion, as Ellie and Frank, and the moody sequence of William Warfield’s Joe singing “Ol’ Man River” as he wanders through a riverbank twilight, are among this misbegotten remake’s few meager assets. Even the score comes off badly: Mahin, or somebody, has tinkered unwisely with the lyrics (Ellie sings “I got talent but it ain’t been tested” instead of “I got virtue…”), and the numbers lip-synched by Ava Gardner, as Julie, are given soupy, supper-club arrangements. Practically every number is taken too slowly, and Kern’s romantic tenor music seems to sit very uncomfortably in Howard Keel’s baritone range.
The misguided “solutions” of the MGM 1951 remake, by contrast, put the boldness of Hammerstein’s work, and the integrity of Whale’s, into high relief. If Hammerstein did not solve the dilemma of how to shape the story’s many elements into a unified whole, he at least gave audiences a sense of his material’s breadth and gravitas, as well as its emotional depth; if Whale did not shape it into a wholly perfect film, he at least gave it long sequences of cinematic power as well as charm. In MGM’s hands, the story’s social background—in particular its Black presence—has been minimized to the point of disappearance, while its painful aspects have been softened into a sentimental goo that sinks into the surrounding lushness. Whale’s 1936 version gives a picture of American life; MGM’s remake shows how, in 1951, Americans wanted to believe that money and the vulgar profusion of Technicolored objects could solve all our problems. The deadly reckoning we face today constitutes the ultimate criticism of the Freed unit’s comfort-centered false optimism. Hammerstein and Whale, in 1936, had deeper concerns and were willing to face them more honestly. Their Show Boat, in consequence, stands as a genuine picture of American life, flawed perhaps, but genuine in its awareness of the reality that must underlie any theatrical romance. Without the grit of that reality, the escape into romance gives no pleasure. And Show Boat’s greatness, onstage or in Whale’s film, may be said to stem from its creators’ somber yet exhilarating acceptance of that truth. They made compromises with it, but they did not, like MGM, try to smother it in luxury. For them, the America they strove to capture meant something more: an abiding love of the past that nevertheless refused to flinch at its sorrows, but faced them honorably.
One of the very smallest speaking roles in Whale’s film belongs to the Black actor Clarence Muse, a notable figure in African-American film history. Seen mopping up the auditorium of the Trocadero, he is the person who later reports to Green (Charles C. Wilson), the club’s manager, that Julie has gone out on a bender. When asked why he didn’t stop her, he replies, with quiet firmness, “You hired me as a doorman, not a nursemaid.” This terse remark—there is nothing like it and no such character in the 1951 remake—affirms, like so many moments, what gives Whale’s 1936 film its value: its willingness to accept the basic premise of the human drama, the idea that every individual has a claim to personhood, that people who are not rich, not famous, or not glamorous are nonetheless human beings, with lives, needs, and aspirations of their own. We may all be forgotten as the river keeps rolling along, but while we are here, our existence must be acknowledged.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’
Marcel Carné’s ‘Children of Paradise’
William Wyler’s ‘Counsellor-at-Law’
Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ & ‘The Curse of the Cat People’
