Show Boat (1936 film)

Show Boat is a 1936 film. Directed by James Whale, it is based on the musical Show Boat by Jerome Kern music and Oscar Hammerstein II script and lyrics, which the team adapted from the Show Boat by Edna Ferber.

The musicals story spans about forty years, from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. Magnolia Hawks is an eighteenyearold on her familys show boat, the Cotton Palace which travels the Mississippi River putting on shows. She meets Gaylord Ravenal, a charming gambler, falls in love with him, and eventually marries him. Together with their baby daughter, the couple leaves the boat and moves to Chicago, where they live off Gaylords gambling winnings. After about ten years, he experiences an especially bad losing streak and leaves Magnolia, out of a sense of guilt that he is ruining her life because of his losses. Magnolia is forced to bring up her young daughter alone. In a parallel plot, Julie LaVerne the show boats leading actress, who is part AfricanAmerican, but passing as white is forced to leave the boat because of her background, taking Steve Baker her white husband, to whom, under the states law, she is illegally married with her. Julie is eventually also abandoned by her husband, and she becomes an alcoholic. Magnolias becomes a success on the stage in Chicago. Twentythree years later Magnolia and Ravenal are reunited at the theater in which Kim, their daughter, is appearing in her first Broadway starring role.This film version of Show Boat stars Irene Dunne as Magnolia and Allan Jones as Ravenal, with Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Queenie Smith, Sammy White, Donald Cook, Hattie McDaniel, Charles Middleton, and Arthur Hohl. It was directed by James Whale, who tried to bring as many people from the stage production as he could to work on the film. Florenz Ziegfeld, who died in 1932, had originally produced Show Boat onstage. Winninger, Morgan and White had all previously played their roles in both the original 1927 stage production and the 1932 stage revival of the musical. Robeson, for whom the role of Joe was actually written, had appeared in the show onstage in London in 1928 and in the Broadway revival of 1932. Dunne had been b

Source: Wikipedia