Show Boat (1929 Film) - Storyline

Storyline

Contrary to what is often claimed, the 1929 film is not really an adaptation of the classic 1927 Kern–Hammerstein Broadway musical Show Boat, which was based on the same novel. Its plot line sticks much closer to the novel than to the stage production, but avoids the racial controversy that plays a prominent role in both Ferber's novel and the Kern-Hammerstein Broadway show. On the other hand, it features risqué material related in the book but completely omitted from the Broadway musical adaptation, such as the depiction of a Chicago bordello.

Following the novel, the film starts when Magnolia, the daughter of Captain Andy Hawks and his wife Parthy, is still a little girl. (Magnolia is aged 18 at the start of the musical.) In both the novel and in the 1929 film, Cap'n Andy and Parthy die, whereas in the musical and the subsequent film versions based on it, all of the characters remain alive, despite the fact that the story spans forty years (in the novel, the span is a decade longer). However, in a nod to the stage musical, Magnolia and her gambler husband Gaylord Ravenal are reunited on the show boat at the end of the 1929 film, whereas in the novel, Ravenal not only never returns to Magnolia, but dies in San Francisco, and after Parthy's death Magnolia returns to the showboat a widow, giving her own inheritance money to her daughter Kim.

The interracial marriage between the mulatto actress Julie and her white husband Steve, the section of Ferber's novel that made the stage musical so unusual for its time, was completely dropped from the 1929 film to appease censors and Southern audiences, and Julie in this version was not only made a white woman, but was evicted from the boat not because of her illegal marriage to a white man, but because of Parthy's jealousy over her relationship with Magnolia (to whom Julie is a sort of surrogate mother and confidante). Years later, Julie becomes the madam of that Chicago bordello, not an alcoholic as in the musical, and the disappearance of her husband is left unexplained.