The second film version of the musical based on Edna Ferber's novel stars Irene Dunne as the daughter of a show boat captain who falls in love with a gambler and marries him, suffering through hard times as a result. Although James Whale might seem like an odd choice to direct this, he does a pretty amazing job, and you can see that he brings the same outsider sensibility that he brought to the "Frankenstein" films. By modern standards, the treatment of the black characters will hardly seem enlightened (Dunne even has a musical number in black face), but by the standards of 1936 it actually was. The film got a special dispensation from the Hayes Office to keep the miscegenation plot line in the film, and the film very decidedly defends mixed race marriages. Paul Robeson's shiftless, lazy black man character is not enlightened, but Robeson brings this character to vivid life and he's clearly one of the most sympathetic and memorable characters in the film. As a musical, it suffers from the sort of overly operatic singing you get in a lot of films from this period, but it has great songs and is a pretty compelling drama on its own terms.
