Show Boat

Show Boat is one of those rude beasts that lie at the center of American popular culture.  (And does America have any culture other than the "popular"?)  Edna Ferber's novel, a blockbuster in the twenties, was adapted into a musical and then, made and remade as a film three times.  It's as if Hollywood was struggling to get it right, but whatever was wrong about Show Boat was too irremediably wrong to ever be put right.  The film is about race even when the Black folk are pushed to the side and mostly invisible, as during the movie's second half.  People "pass" for White in the movie until it's necessary to speak (or sing) from the heart or entertain the public.  Then, you can "cork up" and be a "coon-shouter" like Al Jolson.  The 1936 film version is the most raw, and, therefore, the most true version of an archetypal American story, a heart-breaking collision between profound empathy for the Other and the crudest sort of racism.  The director, James Whale, knew about "passing" -- he was a gay man in ostensibly straight Hollywood and, although he never concealed his sexual orientation, he lived among those who did.  The messages in Show Boat are so incredibly mixed that the film threatens to collapse into chaos.  But Whale was a great director and, somehow, the material coheres in the 1936 version.  Both the 1929 and 1951 versions lacked Whale's courage -- both of them duck the theme of miscegenation central to the material.  In Whale's film, someone declares that a "drop of black blood" in your body makes you a Negro.  By this criterion, the film shows that we are all Negroes  -- our culture throbs with Black blood as does the body politic.  Early in the film, a couple performing in the melodramas that the showboat peddles to its paying customers is accused of miscegenation, a crime in Natchez where the paddle-wheeler is docked,  When the sheriff comes to arrest the couple, the White husband of an octoroon, passing for Caucasian, draws a knife and slits the finger of his wife.  Then, he sucks some of  her blood. The scowling sheriff makes his accusation and the man replies:  "I can swear on a Bible that I have black blood inside of me."  The witnesses to his act swear to this as well.  By this stratagem, obviously conceived in advance of the accusation, the White man has made himself Black.  Later, the heroine smears black soot on her face, paints her lips zinc-white, and performs a minstrel song.  But it doesn't work -- she's singing the lyrics to the tune, "Galivantin'" in a warbling contralto, the timbre used in operetta, not the Blues.  The heroine, like the man sucking Negro blood, has made herself Black -- but it's a sinister transformation, not homage but something like vampirism.  In the economy of the film, real Blacks are sacrificed so that the White folks can prosper -- but it is the Black characters who ultimately understand the meaning of the sprawling epic in which everyone is trapped.  This is dramatized by the musical's them, "Ole Man River", a song about the pain and tragedy of existence -- life is a great muddy river that just keeps rolling along, indifferent to our suffering and sorrow.  In 
Show Boat, in obedience to the song, (the film's last shot is great expanse of the river in moonlight), even ostensibly happy endings are profoundly problematic. 

Whale's version of the film begins with the show boat docking in a squalid-looking Southern river-town, Natchez.  There's a parade, but the show people, who proclaim themselves to be "one happy family" are quarreling and discontented.  Julie the leading lady who is passing as White, is unhappy with her Caucasian husband and may have had an affair.  For reasons that seem unclear in the film, the spurned lover tells the sheriff about her race, triggering an accusation of miscegenation.  After the blood-sucking incident, Julie and her husband depart from the company -- the good folks of Mississippi will not authorize Black performers to share the stage with White actors.  Captain Andy, the proprietor of the showboat needs to find another couple to headline the primitive melodrama performed on the boat.  His daughter, Magnolia, has played piano for the company and knows the show and so, notwithstanding the objections  of his comically monstrous harridan wife, Parthenia, he gives the girl the role of the heroine.  Hence, we see at the outset that a Black woman, Julie, is displaced by a White ingenue, Nola. as Magnolia is called.  A handsome riverboat gambler, Gaylord Ravenal is passing through town.  He sees Nola on the boat, wants to seduce her, and so joins the company as the leading man --dissembling is easy for him and acting is just another form of lying.  The inevitable romance follows and Nola is successful on-stage.  Against the objections of her mother, Parthenia, Nola marries the riverboat gambler now her leading man.  She gets pregnant and, when the baby  is born, the raffish, irresponsible Gaylord Ravenal, her husband, is playing poker on shore.  There's a tremendous storm and the loyal Black servant risks his life in the tempest to find a doctor to attend to the laboring woman.  A baby girl is born.  The spat between Gaylord and Parthenia is terrible and the couple, with their small child, move to Chicago.  There they take a room at the grand Palmer House and live far beyond their means.  The child. little Kim, is sent to a convent to be educated.  (Although this is unclear from the film, apparently, Nola and Gaylord are living off proceeds paid to the wife as her share in the showboat.)  When the money runs out, the feckless Gaylord simply decamps, after saying goodbye to his little girl, in a painfully moving scene.  Nola, abandoned by her husband, is without resources.  However, a couple who performed on the Cotton Queen, as the showboat is named,  coincidentally encounter Nola as she is being evicted.  (The little girl remains at the Convent on the last of the family's money.)  The couple, who have a comedy routine and are hoofers, are performing at the Trocadero and they suggest that Nola, who can sing like an angel, seek employment on-stage with them.  At the Trocadero, the octoroon, Julie (now also alone) is the revue's prima donna and has become an alcoholic, but she can still sing.  She croons a song and, then, retires to her dressing room with a bottle of rum.  Nola sings to audition for a role but she's rejected by the mean, strutting impresario.  Julie recognizes Nola's voice and learns of her situation from a cynical Black janitor, a wise-guy whose got the number of all the people around him.  Julie, recognizing that she's washed-up, and that Nola is desperate for the job, walks away from the Trocadero never to be seen again -- it's the second time, Julie is sacrificed in favor of Nola.  The vulgar impresario listens reluctantly to an African-American song performed by Julie and says that she can perform in his revue as a "coon-shouter" -- that is in Black-face.  On New Year's Eve, Captain Andy has come to Chicago with his wife -- they don't yet know about the reversal of fortunes that has made Nola homeless.  Parthenia goes to bed with a headache and Captain Andy, giddy in the company of three prostitutes, goes to the Trocadero.  There Nola is singing a heavily vibrato version of "After the Ball" and the revelers aren't impressed -- they are hooting and mocking her.  Captain Andy recognizes her voice and, then, her face and stands up in the drunken crowd directing her performance with tears in his eyes.  (The film is fantastically effective as a melodrama).  Nola rallies and complete the song to a standing ovation.  Emboldened by this success, she goes onto to become a great Broadway chanteuse and actress.  Her career takes her all around the Globe.  By this time, Nola's daughter, Kim is grown.  Nola trains her to become an actress and she too is soon famous on Broadway -- by this time, twenty years, at least, have passed, although Captain Andy and Parthenia who seem to have been born old, don't really age.  Nola is visibly older; her hair is grey and she has  retired from the stage.  Captain Andy, Parthenia, and Nola attend a musical in which Kim stars.  (Curiously, in a sort of mise en abyme, the musical is about the ante-bellum South featuring plantation ladies in crinoline and dancing darkies, something akin to the musical Show Boat from which the film derives.)   Gaylord Ravenal, now old and sick, is working as a stage-door manager at the theater so that he can be close to his daughter, Kim, who doesn't recognize him.  He hears Kim singing and creeps up to the corridor outside the fancy boxes to spy on the stage.  Nola sees Gaylord, recognizes the erring husband, now absent for a quarter of a century, and invites him into their box overlooking the stage.  Kim, taking her bows, calls for her mother to sing with her.  Nola begins to sing one of the film's saccharine operetta numbers and Gaylord joins with her -- then, Kim also begins to sing on stage as well.  It's the film's end and there's not a dry eye in the house -- except that, viewed in a cool retrospective light, this isn't really a convincingly happy ending.  Julie is gone, presumably dead from alcoholism, the Black folk are still impoverished and oppressed, and there's not much hope that Gaylord will really be forgiven for taking a powder and deserting his family for 25 years - this seems just a wee bit implausible.  If the characters, Nola and Kim, can forgive him, the film's audience can not.

Readers will notice that the plot summary doesn't really mention the two pivotal characters in the film, Jim and Queenie (Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniels). The Black characters, although integral to the film's first half, are fundamentally marginal -- they don't figure in the picture's second half and are invisible at Show Boat's denouement.  But emotionally, Jim and Queenie cast a shadow over the whole film and they are most present, in fact, when absent from the movie.  Jim and Queenie represent the sole happy marriage in the film and are exemplars of the way that people should behave toward one another -- they aren't idealized and bicker incessantly but they seem to love one another and are forgiving of each other's flaws.  The film's greatest technical defect (which it shares with the musical) is that the best number is in the first act, and, indeed, only about ten minutes into the action.  This is the show-stopper "Ole Man River", a transcendent bass song, that is both enormously effective and, also, profoundly racist -- in Mozart's time, noble voices sang high, even in the range of the countertenor, and the lowest register was reserved for old men and buffoons.   Similarly, the deep and low notes in "Ole Man River" are stereotypically reserved for the big buck Negro -- it's a pernicious caricature that persisted through the deep voices in Amos 'n Andy and remains today, for instance, in the basso profundo tones of the spokesman for Allstate on Tv commercials.  But what Whale does with the song is astonishing.  He recognizes that the number is the emotional center of the film, that the score will play variations on the tune throughout the movie, and that he has to make the performance indelible.  So Whale audaciously rotates the camera in a tight circle around Robeson who is sitting on a dock, then, swoops in for a close-up -- then, he cuts away to stylized expressionistic shots of Black men toting enormous bales of cotton or rhythmically hoeing in fields, reverting to vignettes of Robeson drunk or confined in jail.  The song continues as a chorus of shabby, bedraggled Black singers assembles with Robeson and comes to a thunderous conclusion in which the show tune is elaborated into both an anthem and lament for lost freedom.  The effect is tremendous, shattering and there is nothing approaching the emotional power of this scene in the rest of the film.  In a very real sense, Robeson's performance and Whale's majestic camera movements have seized the film, dismissed its melodrama, and rendered the plight of the African-American characters central, marginalizing, as it were, the White performers.  This is evident from the way that the blood-sucking scene is staged -- as the loathsome White sheriff accuses Julie of miscegenation, Jim stands high overhead and the action cuts away to show him looking down on the scene as somehow superior to it, both a witness and a judge.  The ebb and flow of life in the sprawling film (it encompasses three generations) is embodied in the image of the Mississippi, the film's old man, and Robeson's performance, with that of Hattie McDaniels anchors the film and provides its subtext even when the plot moves to Chicago and leaves the African-American characters behind. 

Thematically, Whale constructs the film around dichotomies.  The romance sequences are coded:  when the camera is facing the river, shown in luminous moonlit rear projection, the theme is love and the style is poetic.  The reverse shot showing the river town is conventionally prosaic and realistic.  The Blues tunes, which are brilliant, collide with whiter-than-white operetta numbers -- this happens sometimes in the same song ("Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly", for instance, rendered in various styles, as an opera song and, then, ragtime.)  In one of the film's most startling numbers, Julie is singing a blues tune and Nola begins to dance -- she writhes and undulates in a spooky wa; it's like a kind of seizure..  Of course, this is a staid white woman, Parthenia's daughter, imitating Black dance.  It doesn't work and looks foolish, even disturbing, but you can't look away and when Nola emerges on the deck of the paddlewheeler still dancing with Hattie McDaniels behind her and waving the palms of her hands in the air like Al Jolson singing "Mammie" we're in some dark and vicious place that, somehow, also represents the divided soul of American culture and the best that we can ever do.