Show Boat

The musical Show Boat has often been held up as the first modern American musical, in part because of its focus on a social issue: racism. The one time I saw the stage play, it struck me as long and static. By the end of the first act, Joe has finished singing "Old Man River," by far the strongest moment of the show, and Julie LaVerne has been evicted from the show boat with her lover after it is revealed she is half black. Then the musical drags on for another long act. Once Julie LaVerne leaves, the stage play (as I remember it) lacks much tension or dramatic excitement and instead becomes a kind of pageant play about the private and public life of Magnolia Hawks. The emphasis is cyclical—people are young and romantic, they have ambitions and love affairs, they grow old and disappointed, and their children enter into the same cycles on their own. The stage play did not strike me as particularly cheerful.

There are three film versions of Show Boat, one made in 1929, another in 1936, and the third in 1951. In the 1951 version, the garish Technicolor hues are unnaturally bright and bizarre. Although the film's focus in its first 40 minutes on miscegenation may be a sign of what passed in 1951 for a social conscience, this is hardly the main focus. Once Julie leaves, she is largely forgotten until she appears briefly later in the film in Chicago and then again in Natchez. Julie is a version of what used to be termed in American literary studies the tragic mulatto—a character whose mixed racial heritage becomes a source of tragedy and suffering in a society that cannot tolerate racial mixtures. In the film, the people on the show boat are apparently accepting of Julie, but when a spurned lover betrays her to the local sheriff, he enforces the local laws against love between the races. Although the cast and crew on the show boat protest, the sheriff is determined to enforce the law, and she leaves. Is Julie's situation tragic because of society's racism or because she is half black? Is society's racism held up as worse than the fact that poor Julie is part black, and therefore (in the view of the film) inferior--in which case the film itself is racist? This is one of the fundamental issues in stories concerned with racial mixed characters who come to bad ends. The play shows its inability or unwillingness to confront this question by simply dropping it. The focus then falls squarely on Magnolia (Kathryn Grayson) and her romance with the river gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Howard Keel). The film then turns into a romance about show business and disappointment in love. The film also significantly changes the latter half of the play.

Julie LaVerne's character, played by Ave Gardner, possesses certain coded characteristics that are linked to African American stereotypes. She is passionate, she becomes an alcoholic, is involved in a series of love affairs, and when we see her towards the end of the film she is haggard and dissolute. She is the only woman in the film who in any sense seems sensuous, while the other young white women are prim, proper, and antiseptic. Julie also carries out a sacrificial function by giving up her role in a stage review when she learns that Magnolia is trying out for the role--that is, the black character sacrifices herself for a white character. Her sacrifice is also an act of self-destruction. Late in the play, she plays a key role again in bringing Ravenal and Magnolia back together. Once she departs from the main focus of the film, she fulfills an essentially subservient role. Therefore although the film may portray racism as regrettable, it also seems to portray Julie's partial blackness as less than desirable itself.

Early in the film, as the show boat approaches the riverbank for the first time, we see several scenes of African Americans working happily in the fields and lolling in a carefree manner around the decrepit, broken-down shacks in which they live. These early scenes do not suggest that the film takes an especially enlightened view of issues of race.

Although the film illuminates the racism of the society it portrays, it does not suggest a possibility for change. Instead it expresses a fatalistic sense of social determinism—as if racism, bias, the victimization of one group of people by another, are inevitable, inescapable conditions of life. The most powerful expression of this idea in the play and film comes in the song "Old Man River." Whatever one may think of the play or the film, or even the message of the song itself, "Old Man River" is powerful and moving. William Warfield as the African American stevedore Joe sings beautifully. Essentially "Old Man River" is a black man's lament about the sorry condition of human existence. It complains about hard work ("tote dat barge, lift dat bale"), about victimization by a society and a set of laws over which one has no power ("get a little drunk and you land in jail"), and the mortal, limited nature of human existence in general ("tired of living and scared of dyin'"). The ballad is the play's way of explaining away the sorry circumstances of Julie LaVerne's expulsion from the river boat—racism is just the nature of life, the film and the song imply, you have to accept it. Neither the film nor the play offers any alternative explanation. The song is an expression of determinism, pessimism, of the notion that these moments of oppression must happen and there is no changing them.

Both the play and film explore a parallel circumstance to racism--the victimization of women by the men they fall in love with and marry. Julie has a series of increasingly unhappy love affairs. Magnolia marries a riverboat gambler whose luck goes bad and who abandons her. Again the film suggests this is the condition of life. There's no changing it.

I found the central portion of the film, which focuses on Magnolia's marriage to Ravenal, tedious and predictable, like the play. The 1951 version of Show Boat offers a set of final scenes that are true tear jerkers. As sentimental and hackneyed as they were, they certainly had me reaching for the tissues. Ravenal meets Julie on a riverboat. She attacks him for her abandonment of the pregnant Magnolia, and he protests that he did not know Magnolia was pregnant. From Julie, Ravenal learns that Magnolia and their child are on the show boat in Natchez, where the riverboat on which he is travelling is about to dock. He finds his child playing with a doll, pretending that it is her father. He suggests that they pretend he is her father, and he sits her on his knee.

From a 2008 perspective this is a creepy scene—a little girl approached by a man she does not know who offers to play with her and then sits her on his knee. The film is wholly impervious to these resonances that are apparent to us only because in 2008 we are so jaded. Then Magnolia finds her daughter with the husband who abandoned her. After twenty seconds of gazing at each other, Magnolia and Ravenal embrace and reunite. Everything ends in happiness.