by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night at 8 p.m. I resumed the excursion my husband Charles and I are doing through the entire canon of film director James Whale in chronological order. We’d reached the point in 1936 at which Whale was assigned the direction of the big-budget Universal musical Show Boat, a turning point in his career in both good and bad ways. The good way is that this adaptation of a musical already considered a classic – it had debuted in 1927 and had been a success both then and in a 1932 revival – is a stupendous film, a near-ideal adaptation of its source. It was also a good story for James Whale – despite the opposition of the star, Irene Dunne, to him as director on the ground that he was British and therefore presumably couldn’t understand the culture of the American South – because it touched on so many of his favorite themes. It was based in and around the world of the theatre, which was always where he felt most at home; it was full of “outsider” characters who meet catastrophic ends due to racial and social prejudices (hooking Whale’s status both as a working-class Britisher who’d carefully adopted the accent and mannerisms of an aristocrat, and as a Gay man in a time in which living openly as such was a social and legal impossibility – though Whale tried as hard as he could); it offered opportunities for romantic scenes (something few of Whale’s previous movies had done – probably the closest was By Candlelight) and atmospheric cinematography; and it was an already proven property that had pushed through the barriers of what was considered possible on the Broadway stage as well as on film.
Show Boat began life as a novel by Edna Ferber, written in 1924 but not published until 1926, centered around Captain Andy Hawks (Charles Winninger), the owner of the Cotton Blossom show boat (though the name in the film was changed to Cotton Palace because apparently the owners of a real boat called the Cotton Blossom threatned to sue) which operates up and down the Mississippi River in the late 19th century; his wife Parthenia (Helen Westley), inevitably nicknamed “Parthy Ann”; their daughter Magnolia (Irene Dunne); the leading couple in the show boat’s plays, Julie LaVerne (Helen Morgan) and her husband Steve Baker (Donald Cook); and the two leading Black characters, boat hand Joe (Paul Robeson) and his wife Queenie, the cook (Hattie McDaniel). Julie turns out to be half-Black and she and Steve are driven off the show buat by local prejudices and the machinations of Pete (Arthur Hohl), a member of the show boat crew who has an unrequited crush on Julie, who’s incensed when Julie gives a necklace Pete gave her to the Black cook Queenie and exacts his revenge by getting a copy of Julie’s birth certificate which documents that her “mammy” was Black. Julie and Steve are driven off the show boat, while Captain Andy – very much against the wishes of his wife – presses their daughter Magnolia into the lead in his production. Needing a new leading man as well, he hires Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), a riverfront gambler who needs to get out of Natchez, Mississippi in a hurry and is also smitten with Magnolia. The two become show boat stars and a couple off-stage as well, and they get married and have a daughter, Kim; but no sooner is she born and Magnolia recovered enough to travel than the Ravenals leave the show boat and head for Chicago.
When Gaylord is flush they stay at the Palmer House (for years Chicago’s finest, fanciest and highest-status hotel); when he’s broke they end up in furnished rooms with (stereo)typical Irish landladies hounding them for rent money. Throughout their financial ups and downs they keep Kim in a boarding school run by a convent, and one day Gaylord realizes that as much as he loves both his wife and daughter, his gambling addiction isn’t doing them any good long-term and he decides to leave them. By chance the comic-relief couple who performed with them on the show boat, Frank and Elly Schultz (Sammy White and Queenie Smith), run into Magnolia just as she’s broke, abandoned and out of options, and suggest she try out for a gig at the Trocadero nightclub in Chicago. Asked what sort of songs she sings, she tells the club manager, “I sing Negro songs” – to which he replies, “Oh, a coon shouter” (an odd term used in the early 20th century to mean a white singer who could sound Black; Sophie Tucker was promoted by Edison Records as a “coon shouter” and her breakthrough hit, “Some of These Days,” was by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks.) Their daughter Kim eventually grows up and follows in her mom’s (and her grandpa’s!) footsteps as an entertainer.
Edna Ferber’s novel is quite a bit darker than the script Oscar Hammerstein II came up with for the musical, for which he recruited Jerome Kern as composer even though Kern, like Hammerstein, had never written for such a dark story before. In the book Captain Andy is killed when he’s thrown off the show boat by a river storm and drowns in the Mississippi, and Julie, after she’s fired from the show boat and Steve leaves her, becomes Chicago’s leading madam. But even with the softening – including a late-in-life reunion for Magnolia and Gaylord at Julie’s Broadway debut and a different denouement for Julie’s character (she becomes a nightclub star in Chicago but blows her career on alcoholism and the unreliability it leads to), Show Boat was a weird story for a Broadway musical. Most musical shows until then had been either revues (shows which just alternated songs, dances and comic sketches and had no plot) or silly stories whose function was just to cue in the songs. Hammerstein got an option on the rights from Ferber, shopped around his idea for a musical that dealt openly with interracial relationships, gambling, alcoholism and other manifestations of the darker side of life – and got the go-ahead from, of all people, Florenz Ziegfeld, producer of the Ziegfeld Follies revues and noted for his extravagance (when he died in 1932 he was $4 million in debt and his actress wife, Billie Burke, had to go back to work to pay off his creditors) and aversion to anything serious on his stages, nonetheless put Show Boat into production – and was rewarded with an enormous hit.
The first time Show Boat became a movie was in 1929. Even before the musical was made Universal had purchased the film rights to Ferber’s book, and when the musical came through and became a big stage hit they made sure they got the rights to it as well. Only they’d already started filming the Ferber novel before they closed the deal for the musical – with Harry Pollard directing just after he’d made a successful film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another movie about racial politics and customs in the South – as a silent, and what emerged when they finally finished was an assemblage including silent sequences, sound scenes and songs – but not the Kern-Hammerstein songs from the play because producer and entrepreneur Billy Rose had convinced Universal’s executives that everyone was tired of hearing those songs and they should hire him to write a new score. When Universal previewed the film, audiences protested that the Kern-Hammerstein songs weren’t in it, so they filmed a 20-minute prologue with members of the show’s stage cast featured in some of the original songs. The 1929 Show Boat survives only in partial form, with some scenes having picture but no sound (not even the synchronized music-and-effects track the film had when first released), some (including half of the prologue) having sound but no picture, but enough survives to indicate that Pollard had made a reasonably impressive film. He also got one detail right that both Whale and George Sidney, who made a third version for MGM in 1951, got wrong: a show boat was not a self-propelled steamboat. It was a barge that was moved up and down the river by a tug which was called a “tow boat,” but contrary to the impression you’d get from the name, instead of being in front of the show boat it was behind it, pushing it forward. (Ferber took pains to get this right in her novel, including making sure she had Captain Andy give the proper orders to the tow boat’s crew.)
In the mid-1930’s, Universal decided to remake the movie and draw as many of the cast members as possible from the stage casts, including Irene Dunne as Magnolia and Paul Robeson as Joe. Neither had been in the 1927 premiere – though Dunne had taken over from the original Magnolia, Norma Terriss, during the first run. Jules Bledsoe, one of Robeson’s rivals (along with Roland Hayes) for the Black-male-concert-singer market niche, was the first Joe, but Robeson had played the part in the 1932 revival (Ziegfeld’s last production and one he put on because he was hoping it would be a sure-fire hit and would help pay off his debts). The first Queenie was Tess Gardella, who was actually white but played a lot of character roles in blackface and was also the first model for Aunt Jemima (and a box of Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix with her picture on it is prominently featured in Hattie McDaniel’s kitchen in the 1936 film). Universal wanted to borrow Nelson Eddy, then riding the sensational success of his films Naughty Marietta and Rose Marie with Jeanette MacDonald, from MGM to play Gaylord, but Jerome Kern vetoed that, saying, “Eddy’s a baritone. I wrote it for a tenor.” The actor they hired was, ironically, Allan Jones, whose turn-down of Naughty Marietta had paved the way for Eddy’s stardom.
The assignment of James Whale as director ticked off a lot of people in the cast – including Irene Dunne, who wondered what a British director whose most famous previous credit was Frankenstein would know about directing a musical about the American South, but one cast member Whale did get along with was Robeson. While most of Show Boat is filmed relatively straightforwardly (except for the virtually constant camera movement, one of Whale’s trademarks), the scene in which Robeson sings “Ol’ Man River” is dazzling in its virtuosity. It looks like we’ve suddenly been catapulted into the world of music videos as Whale takes Robeson off the waterfront set at which he begins the number and puts him in various setups that dramatize the song’s lyrics. It’s a blessing that we not only have a filmed performance of Robeson doing what became his trademark song, but one directed by a genius instead of a Hollywood (or British) hack – albeit a Gay genius whom I’ve long believed, judging from the number of excuses Whale found to show Robeson topless, had a crush on him.
As for Julie, they got another veteran of the on-stage casts, Helen Morgan, and there’s an uncomfortable life-imitates-art parallel in that she too was a major cabaret star who blew her career on alcohol – though she’s absolutely stunning in the role. Like Rouben Mamoulian in Morgan’s first film, Applause (1929), Whale was able to get her to act with wrenching dramatic power – and John Mescall, the cinematographer Whale insisted on using despite his own issues with the bottle, photographs her so stunningly she looks younger here than she had in the 1934 film Marie Galante even though that was made two years earlier. The 1936 Show Boat was both an artistic and a commercial success, but it cost Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. their control of Universal, the studio the senior Laemmle had founded in 1912. The Laemmles had put their two most important directors, Whale and John Stahl, in charge of big-budget movies – Whale’s Show Boat and Stahl’s Magnificent Obsession, made a year earlier – and both went way over budget and schedule, with the overages on Show Boat eating up the big grosses on Magnificent Obsession almost as soon as they came in.
To keep the studio going, Laemmle, Sr. cut a deal with a financier named J. Cheever Cowdin who ran what today would be called a hedge fund, and Cowdin agreed to lend Universal money but on the condition that if the loan weren’t paid back in time, he would have the option to force Laemmle to sell him the studio. (Most accounts of this transaction have depicted it as an awful deal Laemmle was forced to accept, but in his James Whale biography James Curtis claims Laemmle was actually anxious to sell the studio and retire.) Laemmle fell behind on the loan and Cowdin took over the studio two days after Whale finished shooting. Cowdin put a former Paramount executive named Charles Rogers in charge of the company and ordered a stop to Universal’s famous run of horror films in favor of low-budget romances and comedies. Universal hung out through the rest of the 1930’s largely on the strength of Deanna Durbin’s films (a pity she didn’t arrive in time to play the young adult Kim Ravenal in the final sequence of Show Boat!) and in 1941, under yet another new management team, they scored the most successful film of the year, Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates. Show Boat ended up making a ton of money for Universal but it was Cowdin and his investors, not the Laemmles, who got the profits.
What’s more, Whale found himself no longer working for a foreign-born boss like Laemmle who hadn’t given a damn that he was Gay, but for typical American homophobes of the period. After the failure of Whale’s next Universal film, The Road Back – based on an anti-Nazi novel by Erich Maria Remarque which was eviscerated in the cutting room after the German government objected and Rogers, worried about the effect a ban on Universal’s films in Germany and allied countries would do to the studio financially, yielded and recut the film to sanitize it according to the Germans’ demands – Whale’s partner, David Lewis, set him up at Warner Bros. with a one-film deal to make The Great Garrick, yet another costume drama about theatre people. Alas, The Great Garrick was the sort of sophisticated connoisseur’s picture that was bound to attract a limited audience then or since, so he went back to Universal, worked out his contract in “B” pictures and eventually retired unhappily in 1941.
