While going on yesterday about Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, I stated it was, along with Bob Fosse's Cabaret, the only film version of a Broadway musical that has no feel of staginess about it, that feels like a movie, not an adaptation.
Certainly those two remain the high water mark, but how could I have forgotten James Whale's mostly magnificent 1936 film of Showboat? Like Burton, Whale was a visual stylist who had not previously directed a full-blown musical, but whose dramatic work often moved to eccentric rhythms, whose staging and cutting was always very precise.
And like Sweeney Todd, Showboat doesn't always feel like a musical. Whale often stages and films the song numbers as moments of heightened drama, not as empty spectacle. True, that's how they should be filmed, but as decades of lousy Broadway adaptations have shown us, it sounds easier than it is.
Consider this scene. It starts as mere conversation, though Whale's fluid camera already serves to heighten the importance of what's being discussed. When the song begins, it's almost a throwaway. Then Hattie McDaniels appears and--say, why does Miss Julie know a song only "colored folk" sing? (Plot point! Plot point!) When the song continues, then, Julie has a tone of defensiveness as she sings, knowing full well she's been found out. Then the song passes through more hands, finally turning into a full-blown production number:
But even at that, it doesn't seem like a production number. It snuck up on us somehow, as a spontaneous outburst of joy. Much of the credit for that should go to Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote both the original stage version and the screenplay, and who always believed songs in musicals should serve a specific dramatic purpose.
Still, he was a creature of the stage, and knew, after all, his shows were playing to live audiences. So he had to give them what they wanted--cues for laughter and applause. But though Whale had stage experience, he understood the language of film was very different. The songs in Showboat just sort of happen. And he found a perfect visual style, not stagebound but not realistic in the least. (I love the expressionist closeups of the four faces at the end of the scene.) The story seems to take place in some crazy alternate reality, so we're not surprised by outbursts of song, but mostly unaware of the clanking of theatrical machinery.
Mostly. If Showboat doesn't quite hit the standards of Sweeney Todd and Cabaret, it's because eventually you do hear those gears grinding, the melodramatic stage conventions of the time impose themselves and you're wishing the whole thing would just end. Songs were cut (including Life Upon The Wicked Stage, a big favorite around here) and others streamlined, but the numerous storylines become tedious, and take forever to resolve. Whale's work on this cannot be faulted, but ultimately the material itself tripped him up.
