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Based on the novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat was turned into a
successful and innovative Broadway show by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II
in 1927. In 1928 Paul Robeson was
offered the role of Joe in which he performed “Ole Man River,” a song that
would become his signature piece as the years went by. In 1936 director James Whale wanted Paul
Robeson, who was then living in England, to perform the role for the film
version, and offered Effie and Paul Robeson, despite their reluctance, too much
money to turn it down ($40,000).
With a story that draws attention to the rapid evolution of stage
performance in the United States, most of the activity revolves around the
emerging obsolescence of a showboat company of actors and singers on a showboat
on the Mississippi River from its heyday in the 1880s through the beginning of
the 1920s. There are three loosely
interconnected plots. The first deals with the fate of Julie, who at the beginning
of the film is the star of the company until a disgruntled lover reports her to
the authorities in Mississippi for having black blood and therefore committing
the sin of “miscegenation” with a racially mixed cast. Her leading man, her white husband dramatically
cuts her finger and drinks her blood as the sheriff arrives to close the
company down. But now the husband is
black too in the state of Mississippi by virtue of the “one drop” rule of
racial identity.
The second, larger plot has to do
with the romance of the company director’s daughter (played by Irene Dunne),
who becomes the next leading lady, and her romance with a handsome young
gambler who becomes her leading man.
Meanwhile, Robeson figures in the third entirely subsidiary plot around
his role as Joe, the lazy husband of the company cook (Hattie McDaniels). The well known stereotype
of the comically trifling black husband and his overbearing and not pretty wife
is filled out more tastefully than usual with Robeson’s excellent immaculate
rendition of his songs, eliciting from Daniels (who will subsequently win a
Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind) both
obvious delight at finally having such a wonderful leading man together with
one of the best performances she ever gave on film.
Despite the fact that this film is rife with every stereotype in the
book of Hollywood, Whale seems to weave it all together with a surprisingly
light and deeply engrossing sense of the fun of it all, which figures into a
lesser trend plainly visible in some of Hollywood’s output during the 30s that
there were some constituencies in Hollywood and on Broadway who were beginning
to regard African American culture and black face as fodder for camping it
up. Although there are tangible no
breakthroughs from a contemporary Civil Rights (meaning as envisioned by a
Walter White or a W.E.B. Du Bois) standpoint, there is already the sense that
racial views are not so seriously regarded as they once were. It is hard to imagine, for instance, how
Southern distributors could have excised all signs of race from this film—given
that the African American presence was evenly distributed in almost every frame
of the film with a bevy of black men and women singing and dancing in the
background. Even Clarence Muse’s small
but dignified performance as a janitor near the end of the movie hints of the
coming of a new age in black Hollywood.
The particular disappointments here from a racial standpoint is to remind us that this film is made in what is still
1930s U.S.A. in which Jim Crow is in full effect: the
role of Julie, the mulatto, was not given to the fair skinned, strikingly
beautiful, green-eyed Fredi Washington who had already made an impression as
the mulatto lead in Imitation of Life (1934), but instead to a white
actress (Helen Morgan); and one of Irene Dunne’s largest production
numbers is performed entirely in full black face get-up including wigs and
large painted white lips. She is
nonetheless a delight to watch in every frame throughout, highlighting the increasingly campy aspects of blackface performances during the period, or in other words the manner in which blackface, if it is done right usually involves a send up of gender stereotypes, as well as race.
