James Whale's 1936 version of the musical Show Boat should be required viewing for all students of American history or cinema Based on a best-selling novel by Edna Ferber, the epic story spanning 30 years and several continents touches a raw nerve in the American psyche -- clearly there is something about the subject of the musical that impinges upon our conscience in a persistent and ineradicable way. This is the theme of Black and White miscegenation expressed literally, as well as culturally and symbolically. Consider, for instance, a remarkable set of sequences occurring about fifteen minutes into the two hour film: Queenie, played by the formidable Hattie McDaniels, nags her husband, Joe (Paul Robeson) about his laziness. Joe withdraws from her to the riverside wharf where he sits whittling and sings "Ole Man River." Whale correctly understands that this number is a "show stopper" and so he deploys all of his resources (and the resources of Universal Studios) to extravagantly illustrate the song. The camera dollies in a circle tracking tightly around Joe. The effect of the bravura camera motion is make it seem that Joe is beleaguered, harried, under surveillance from all sides. This effect is emphasized by close-ups of Joe's face. While Robeson sings, he makes sneaky sidelong glances with his eyes, looking away from the camera off-screen as if fearful of a lynch mob or some cruel boss come to torment him. Robeson's face has a wounded and harried expression. Whale inserts into Robeson's basso profundo aria expressionist chiaroscuro shots of African-American workers straining to tote huge bales or hoeing in cotton fields -- these shots have a sinewy, densely corrugated look, something like engravings by Rockwell Kent. "Ole Man River" is followed by a shot in the belly of the showboat where Captain Andy's beautiful daughter, Magnolia, listens to the company's leading lady, Julie, sing a Blues song. (This is a famous song that begins "Fish gotta swim / Birds gotta fly.") The song is mostly tin-pan alley schmaltz but it has Blues-inflected refrain. The song moves Magnolia to dance and she moves in a bizarre undulating motion, a kind of gelatinous wiggle that is supposed to mimic African-American forms of dance -- indeed, she dances with a snaky cartilaginous motion as if, to quote another Blues tune, her "back ain't got no bone." It's altogether extraordinary. When Magnolia sashays out onto the wharf all of the darkies gathered there begin to dance as well -- twenty years before Elvis Presley, we have the spectacle of a White woman trying to dance like an African-American, or, more precisely, with what she might imagine to be the sexual swagger of an African-American. What follows is even more astonishing: a price must be paid for crossing the color line. The sheriff arrives. It turns out that Julie is a quadroon, or something on that order -- that is, a person decreed black by the laws of the State. She has a white husband and, therefore, is in violation of the Mississippi statute. Before the sheriff can enter the showboat to serve his writ, Julie's husband cuts her finger with a knife, holds her bleeding hand to his mouth, and swallows some of her blood. When the sheriff arrives, Julie's husband proclaims that he has Black blood in him and that, therefore, the marriage is lawful "it's true, is it not, that even one drop of Negro blood make you Black," Julie's husband declaims to the snarling sheriff. The witnesses all agree that both have Black blood in them and, for the time being, the couple is spared arrest. These three scenes have an alarming quality both seductive and menacing and illustrate vividly the way that Black and White are intertwined in this country. In fact, these three scenes are so vivid and indelible that the rest of the movie is an exercise in running away from the truths expressed in the opening forty minutes of the film.
In broad terms, Show Boat is a family melodrama. A handsome stranger, Gaylord Ravenal, woos Magnolia, the daughter of Captain Andy, the show boat impresario. When the mulatto, Julie and her husband, the company's leading man, are forced to leave the show boat on charges of miscegenation, Magnolia assumes her role opposite Ravenal. The couple are married and have a child, Kim (Kentucky, Illinois, and Mississippi -- named for the States of the show boat's river town venues). Gaylord and Magnolia leave the show boat for Chicago where they stay for a time at the Palmer House. But Gaylord is a riverboat gambler and a feckless husband. He abandons the family. Impoverished, Magnolia looks for a singing job. Julie, now a broken-down alcoholic (presumably, paying the price for her miscegenation), is singing at a Chicago night club, the Trocadero. She goes on a drinking binge allowing Magnolia to take her part in the revue. Magnolia, of course, is a great performer and becomes an internationally renowned actress -- she performs for the Queen in London. Magnolia retires and her daughter, Kim, takes her place as a leading lady on Broadway. One night, Gaylord Ravenal, now old with white hair, appears at the theater where his daughter is performing. The family is briefly reunited and Magnolia, together with her erring husband, sing a final duet together.
Half of the film's action takes place in a theatrical milieu remote from the titular show boat -- a venue that simply vanishes half-way through the movie and that weakens the film by its disappearance. The theme of the musical is that all American theater is unified by certain themes and styles -- the broad and inept acting on the show boat, interspersed with minstrel oleos and dance numbers, is kissing cousin to, or, even, perhaps, the progenitor of the Broadway musical and the legitimate stage. In effect, American culture is necessarily jazz and blues-inflected: all true American culture is Afro-American. This proposition is illustrated by a dizzying array of musical styles and genres presented by the film -- Show Boat is a virtual musical encyclopedia of pop culture as it existed in 1936. In the film, we see minstrel numbers performed by White people in Black face (at one point Magnolia gets a job as a "coon-shouter") along side performances of African-American dances like the cakewalk performed by actual Black dancers. There are hyper-kinetic versions of Black dance steps performed by White vaudeville players, rag-time numbers, and sentimental ballads as well as an eroticized version of the French Can-Can. In a vast and cavernous night club, Magnolia sings "After the Ball is Over" while her drunken father weeps. Vaudeville performers prance about in top hat and cane and Captain Andy does a spectacular knock-about slapstick routine in which her plays all the parts of romantic triangle involved in a fistfight. All of this is presented with the utmost exuberance -- when the show boat docks in the little Mississippi town where the film begins, everyone dashes to the wharf including a horse that breaks loose from its stall and a plump mother pig who abandons her piglets to see the parade of show boat performers. The characters sing in front of enormous humid-looking rear projections, mostly night skies and moonlight or the southern heavens in the afternoon adorned with huge cumulo-nimbus storm clouds. When Magnolia sings the Black-face number, "Galivantin' Around," Whale cuts momentarily, but incisively, to the actual African-American audience relegated to the cheap seats high above the stage rather mournfully watching the performance. Despite the evidence of Black culture everywhere, the film, nevertheless, documents an effort to obscure these origins and to conceal this influence -- in a sequence that has the analytical flavor of Brecht, we see white actors with a Black ballet company performing on an idealized Dixie set on Broadway, an enormous ante-bellum plantation house where colorfully dressed African-Americans dance for their genteel masters and mistresses. To the modern ear, the singing is irritating and pretentious, quasi-operatic warbling that has a pinched, nasal quality. The Romantic lead is particularly problematic: Universal cast a pretty boy actor, Allan Jones, in the role of Magnolia's suitor because of his success in the Marx Brothers' film, A Night at the Opera. Jones has a glazed, enameled look and it doesn't help that everyone calls him "Gay." (Of course, Whale was openly homosexual and, another, more deeply covert subtext in the film, is the gay influence on American pop culture). Jones sings with an enlarged, tremulous vibrato that is painful to hear. In fact, most of the singing in the film doesn't really match the visuals and the eclectic tour of different styles of popular music -- whenever Irene Dunne (as Magnolia) opens her mouth, she sings in a faux-operatic contralto -- it is the exact opposite of the very natural folk-song-like bel canto that Judy Garland displays in a film made only three years later, The Wizard of Oz. Despite these flaws, Show Boat is mandatory viewing.
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