Show-Boat

I was long curious to see this version of Show Boat and how it stood up against the two more well known versions that came out later. It's a curiosity and nothing more.

I'm willing to bet that the film was being shot at the time sound was hurriedly being accommodated for by the major studios. They had to make up for the fact they had hired non-singers for the lead roles so some dialog was added.

They would have been better keeping it a straight silent. Some of Broadway's best shows were done in acceptable silent versions. Kid Boots, Rose Marie, and The Student Prince come to mind.

First of all the whole subplot involving Julie and the miscegenation angle was completely eliminated. Considering that was a controversial theme in those days and gained Show Boat a pioneering reputation, why would you want to sacrifice it.

Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut as Magnolia and Ravenal are acceptable enough. But when the Jazz Singer was made it was the musical interludes with Jolson that made it a hit. There was no rhyme of reason for the parts where dialog was included.

The best performance in the film was Emily Fitzroy who plays Parthy Hawkes like a stone-faced harridan. The later versions with Helen Westley and Agnes Moorehead gave her a trace of humanity. This was one witch of a woman and she never lets up either.

Now that Show Boat is an American classic and it's a classic because of the wonderful Kern-Hammerstein score, I'm not sure anyone would want to bother with this one.

Edna Ferber did not write "Showboat" as a musical, but as a novel, and this 1929 silent-early talkie version fleshes out the story of a complicated marriage and makes it completely believable. It is certainly not dated, especially with the number of people today who are addicted to gambling, and it stands on its own two feet without the Jerome Kern score. I was pleasantly surprised, and enjoyed TCM's broadcast completely.

Favorite scenes: when little Magnolia is torn from Julie (Alma Rubens, who would be dead from heroin addiction only two years later) by her jealous mother (Emily Fitzroy, with her customary severe hairknot appearance), when Gay and Magnolia first meet on the Showboat (how beautiful those close-ups were!), and the ending, when the elderly Gay falls at Magnolia's feet and the forlorn Lonesome Road is sung in the background. The last scene in particular seemed other-worldly to me, and that was because of the performances of both Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut, which were so solid and touching.

Especially compared to the later musical versions, which glossed over some of the more difficult aspects of Gay and Magnolia's marriage, 1929's "Showboat" has the courage to show the seedier aspects of the downward turn in their relationship due to gambling. The Grayson-Keel musical has their child being born after Gay leaves, with Magnolia never informing Gay she was pregnant. But in the 1929 version Gay is shown to basically abandon both wife and young child, instead of living up to his responsibilities to get a real job to provide for them. We should have less sympathy for such a man, but somehow, we understand and forgive.

I had long heard about this film version of "Show Boat", and "Show Boat" being my favorite Broadway musical, I had anticipated this part-talkie as something truly dreadful to sit through. It was televised the other day, and I finally got my chance to see it.

The film is not a catastrophe by any means, but it certainly isn't good, either. It is mostly silent, and much of the dialogue and singing that was originally part of the film has either been lost forever or simply not found yet. Some of the film's two-reel prologue has turned up (both sound and picture) in A&E's biography of Florenz Ziegfeld, so somebody should obtain those excerpts and include them as part of this showing. It is inexcusable for Turner not to have done so. At present, none of the prologue in the TCM print is shown visually; it's all audio, with an "OVERTURE" card on the screen as the songs are sung. And as of now, only two of the five songs originally filmed for the prologue are heard. The prologue now ends with Otis Harlan heard enthusiastically saying, "And now, Jules Bledsoe will sing 'Ol' Man River'!" - however, we never get to see or hear this portion!

The singing by choral groups supposedly heard on the soundtrack isn't in this print of the 1929 film either; all we get during the action is orchestral accompaniment and a few sound effects. Jules Bledsoe's voice can be heard on the soundtrack at the end, singing "The Lonesome Road", a fairly good number also in the style of a work song, but no match for the great "Ol' Man River".

As for the acting, it never becomes the kind of silent film or early talkie acting that strikes people as unintentionally funny. Laura la Plante and Joseph Schildkraut are actually quite good in their dialogue scene on the stage of the show boat (here, as in the 1936 film version, renamed the Cotton Palace). Schildkraut, especially, is good, his Viennese accent hardly getting in the way. He shows a surprising and welcome ability to act "intimately" as opposed to the hammy overacting featured in most early talkies, except in the scene where he gets drunk. Gaylord Ravenal is presented as being much more of a jerk in this version than in the Kern-Hammerstein musical adaptation; he is shown being especially nasty (verbally) to Magnolia when his gambling luck runs out.

The film is directed in a very flat style; nothing in it seems especially interesting and one never becomes involved in the story; in fact, the musical version presents the story more dramatically. The racial angle in the original Ferber novel and in the musical is completely eliminated in this 1929 version, however, draining the film of much of its potential dramatic power and leaving it little more than a romantic soap opera. And without the beautiful Kern-Hammerstein score to hear, except for those two songs in the prologue and an orchestral rendition of "Ol' Man River" played as background music during the boat's arrival, one is tempted to ask, "Why bother with this version when you can have the classic 1936 film, or even the 1951 remake?"

This primitive Part-Talkie "Super Production" was thought lost until a few years ago, but the print that was eventually unearthed missed a sizeable portion of the dialogue and music track…so that, for about 30 minutes during the second half, it features no sound at all (which makes one wonder why underscoring was not employed by the 'restoration' team to counter this utter silence) – with the spoken lines being superimposed in the form of subtitles over the image itself!

Incidentally, I was under the impression that this was to be a Musical – since the coming of Sound ushered in a flood of such fare. However, it chose to follow the Edna Ferber novel and, consequently, differs to a considerable extent from the subsequent two musical renditions. The shooting incident during a performance occurs much earlier here; similarly, the Julie character gets ousted from the show boat while Magnolia is still a child; her fault in the eyes of her employers (whereas they would stick by her in later versions!) does not relate to race but rather morals, as she is eventually discovered to be the Madam of a clandestine brothel!; Captain Andy dies in a sea-storm in this case (while he is allowed to survive elsewhere) on the night Magnolia gives birth; the leading man's re-appearance at the end occurs on the riverboat rather than in a theater; most conspicuously, perhaps, the character of Joe (who sang the show's most enduring number, "Ol' Man River") barely registers this time around!

Even if we do get to see the heroine – a rather unlikely Laura LaPlante, best-known as the imperiled heiress of THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927; itself a studio-hopping warhorse) – performing and strumming on a banjo a couple of times, these turn up during the stretch where the soundtrack goes missing! Ironically, though most of the songs were dropped, this still emerges as the longest version at 119 minutes; the IMDb lists an even longer running-time of 147 and, since only 2 of the 5 announced songs are heard during the "Overture" (one of which features Helen Morgan, the Julie of James Whale's 1936 remake!), this may well be true. Given the straightforward narrative in this version, the inherent mawkishness (what with Magnolia's insufferably prudish mother) of the unfolding drama is much more to the fore now. Still, the money problems afflicting the hero (nicely played by Joseph Schildkraut, from Whale's THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK [1939] and which I also viewed recently!) are better delineated here than later – while sets and expository footage came in handy when dusting off the property just 7 years afterwards! That said, the last act feels just as rushed as always.

I am not familiar with how SHOW BOAT passed on to MGM (from Universal) but the closing title card, obviously bearing the epithet "The End", of this particular version is unaccountably accompanied by the Metro logo – for the record, a similar situation exists with respect to the 1931 Paramount version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE! Finally, comparisons between the 1929 and 1936 movies unequivocally favor the latter, which is stylish where this is generally stodgy. For the record, I own another film by the same director – UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1927), based on yet another chestnut – with which this also happens to share its Southern setting.

...but frustrating if judged as a talkie. I use the term "talkie" in the loosest of terms, because very few talking passages survive. In a tragic reverse of what is the case of many dawn of sound era films, the video film elements for this movie largely remain and do so in good quality, and the talking and singing passages largely do not. For example, you can find CDs of the entire soundtrack of 1929's Gold Diggers of Broadway - minus a very little - but it is the film itself that no longer exists with the exception of two reels. We owe this to the durability of Vitaphone discs and to the throw-away attitude that the film industry had towards these early talking and part-talking experiments.

There is a prologue at the beginning of the film in which stars from the Ziegfeld production do numbers from the musical, and the video portion of that is lost. Then the first half of the film is largely silent with synchronized sound effects. The second half of the film was largely synchronized dialogue, but the audio portion has been largely lost. All that remains where there is both video and dialogue are two short scenes between romantic leads Laura LaPlante (as Magnolia) and Joseph Schildkraut (as Gaylord Ravenal). Notice that the film has Ms. LaPlante billed ahead of the now well-known Schildkraut. LaPlante was a big star at Universal at the time having starred in films such as "The Cat and the Canary".

This incarnation of "Show Boat" differs from the 1936 and 1951 versions in big ways besides just the technical aspects. For one, a large portion of this film is devoted to the disintegration of the Ravenal marriage after the couple leave the Show Boat. Also, Julie is only a passing figure in this film, and Captain Andy has a completely different fate than in the latter two films.

In spite of all the odd decisions - to put the musical numbers associated with Ziegfeld in as a prologue, and to make this musical a part-talkie with non-musical stars in the first place, the film made money for Universal, largely outside the big cities where people had not seen Ziegfeld's Broadway version. In short, this is an example of a film that was dated in technique as soon as it was made, but was rushed out the door in order to cash in on the dawn of sound in motion pictures.