Movies - Show Boat

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	Movies - Show Boat

Show Boat is the name of a musical film based on the stage musical of the same name by Oscar Hammerstein II, which was adapted from the novel by Edna Ferber. The music was by Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. For more about the musical and the plot see: Show Boat
.

Musical numbers

Show Boat is a cornucopia of famous, favorite songs -- songs that many people today do not realize first appeared in this musical. The score includes:

Make Believe
Ol' Man River
Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man
Mis'ry's Comin' Round
Till Good Luck Comes My Way
Life Upon The Wicked Stage
You Are Love
Ah Still Suits Me
Why Do I Love You?
Bill
Goodbye, My Lady Love
After The Ball

Film versions

Show Boat has been made into a movie four times.

1929 Version

Show Boat was filmed in 1929 with a censored story line. This version stars Laura La Plante, Joseph Schildkraut, Otis Harlan, Emily Fitzroy, Alma Rubens, Elise Bartlett, and Jack McDonald. It was adapted by Charles Kenyon, Harry A. Pollard, and Tom Reed and was directed by Pollard. It was mostly a silent film, but did include about thirty minutes of dialogue and singing. Most of the original stage score was scrapped for this version, and it was not a success. It was long considered a lost film, but most of the film has since been recovered, although large portions of the sound track are still missing as of 2006.

1936 Version

The 1936 musical film about Magnolia Hawks, a girl who has grown up on her family's musical-show boat the Cotton Blossom, which travels the Mississippi River putting on shows. She meets Gaylord Ravenal, a charming gambler and marries him, but after about ten years, he leaves her, out of a sense of guilt that he is ruining her life because of his gambling losses. Magnolia is forced to bring up her young daughter alone, but is reunited with the repentant Ravenal after twenty-three years. In a parallel plot, Julie LaVerne (the showboat's leading actress, who is also a white woman with African-American blood) is forced to leave the boat because of her background, taking Steve Baker (her husband, to whom, under the state's law, she is illegally married) with her. He also later abandons her, and she becomes an alcoholic because of this. The 1936 film version of "Show Boat" stars Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Queenie Smith, Sammy White, Donald Cook, and Hattie McDaniel, and was directed by James Whale, who tried to bring as many people from the stage production as he could to work on the film. Winninger, Morgan and White had all appeared in both the original 1927 stage production and the 1932 stage revival. Robeson, for whom the role of Joe was actually written, had appeared in the show onstage in 1928 and 1932, and Dunne had toured the U.S. in the role of Magnolia. The 1936 film enlisted the services of the show's original orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, and its original conductor, Victor Baravalle.

The 1936 version of "Show Boat" is considered by nearly all film critics to be one of the classic film musicals of all time and one of the best stage-to-film adaptations ever made. Except for the final sequence and three additional songs written especially for the film by Kern and Hammerstein, it follows the stage musical extremely closely, unlike the M-G-M 1951 version. It has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

1946 Version

A significant but miniaturized rendition of the show has been included in the 1946 movie Till the Clouds Roll By, which tells a fictional story of Jerome Kern's life. The "Show Boat" segment, which takes up the first fifteen minutes of the film, is more a medley of several of the songs than an actual film version of the show. The mulatto Julie character was played by Lena Horne, while Kathryn Grayson did Magnolia and Tony Martin did Gaylord. Frank Sinatra sang Ol' Man River in the movie's finale. Parts of this mini-rendition were later included into one of the That's Entertainment!
compilation movies.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Show Boat (film) ]

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