After a Lubitschean credit sequence employing a toy carousel with miniature characters and billboards, we see the river and the Cotton Palace, pushed forward by a towboat, and hear the calliope, which attracts white people, black people, and animals from the nearby town. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, soon to be one of the country’s best-known entertainers, announces its arrival, glowingly shot by John J. Mescall. Ferber played with chronology, opening her story with the birth of Kim (a name she claimed to have invented, as an acronym for Kansas, Illinois, and Missouri) in a tiny stateroom so filled with helpers that it seems to prefigure the Marx Brothers. She backtracks to show how Andy Hawks and his wife, Parthy, came to operate the Cotton Blossom (the name was changed for the 1929 film and carried over to the 1936 one) and doesn’t return to Kim’s hectic arrival until chapter 11. The musical skips the backstory, leaping into the present with a promotional parade as Hawks (the incomparable Charles Winninger) introduces his cast of characters, making light of a fistfight as he assures the crowd, repeatedly, that he reigns over “one big, happy family.”



L’amour fou is brewing. Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), a charming fake aristocrat wearing cracked leather shoes and trailing a mysterious past, dawdles on the levee but snaps to attention at the sight of innocent, teenage Magnolia Hawks (Irene Dunne). They sing “Make Believe” against a make-believe cloudscape, a prognostic duet—before the sheriff takes him in for questioning. Jones has the voice to sell the song, and his occasionally frozen smugness is not wrong for the part, but it’s worth noting that Kern feared falling into operetta and argued against casting Jones or any singer for this rather unsympathetic role. “We have never had a good [Ravenal],” he later remarked, “and until Clark Gable plays it and cuts out all the music except ‘Make Believe’ in the convent scene, I suppose we never shall.” Audiences tend to disagree.



Of course, in a better world, the ideal Ravenal would have been Paul Robeson, perhaps the most gifted and charismatic singer-actor of his generation. Kern said he conceived the melody of “Ol’ Man River” after hearing Robeson speak. The part of Joe was built up to make the most of him, and what he does with the role is remarkable. Joe is supposed to be lazy, shiftless, but we never believe that. His very presence suggests a moral center, exuding energy and responsibility. So we enjoy, as he does, the incongruity as he sings “Ol’ Man River,” with its strained, racked, tired-of-living, jailed bodies, while reclining against the levee pilings, whittling. In an insert, he bares his chest, a rare display of black male sex appeal in thirties Hollywood, and he finishes with twinkling eyes and an offhanded shrug. Whale and Mescall’s setup is no less dramatic: a great, encircling crane shot begins on the right side of Joe’s face and pushes in on the left side just as he modulates from verse to chorus. It’s one of the supreme moments in musical cinema.



If it has a match in this film, it will be delivered later by the next featured player, Helen Morgan, the white twenties torch singer famous for performing while seated atop an upright piano, playing the mixed-race Julie LaVerne, a role she originated. In the novel, Magnolia “unwittingly learned more of real music from black [Joe] and many another Negro wharf minstrel,” but in the musical the transference is wittingly imparted by Julie, who thinks of Magnolia as her little sister. The vehicle, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” isn’t just a song, we learn, but a coded entry to a level of black culture that is supposedly covert. Gershwin’s influence on Kern, who had previously influenced him, is apparent in the blue notes and ascending single-note phrases in the bridge, which Morgan ornaments with falsetto mordents. But in the verse (“Oh, listen, sister . . .”), Kern went Gershwin one better, making it a twelve-bar blues; at this point, Gershwin had used blues form in his piano concerto, but not in a pop song. This wasn’t the first time a white songwriter provided what passes for a black paradigm (Irving Berlin’s “Waiting at the End of the Road” serves as an old black spiritual in King Vidor’s all-black Hallelujah, from 1929); but it may be the first instance of racial transference as a theme in which a black or biracial mentor vanishes into oblivion after inspiring a white disciple to achieve stardom. (Subsequent examples abound: Birth of the Blues, Blues in the Night, Dixie, The Jolson Story, New Orleans, Young Man with a Horn, Pete Kelly’s Blues, many others.) Only Magnolia’s minstrel-style shuffling destroys the buzz, especially as she plays it for a laugh. Hard not to cringe. Magnolia’s later blackface number, “Gallivantin’ Around,” is so obviously a parody of minstrel style and not of black people that it is paradoxically less troubling.



Meanwhile, in one of the film’s most dramatically melodramatic scenes, faithful to the passage in the book, Julie, who has been passing for white but is outed as a “mulatto,” and her white husband, Steve, are accused of miscegenation. They escape arrest by cleverly foiling Mississippi’s one-drop-of-Negro-blood decree but flee before they can attract a lynch mob. In the end, Julie will be abandoned by Steve, as Magnolia is by Ravenal, and turn to drink; she will sacrifice her career to repay Magnolia for her loyalty as the sweetest kid she ever knew. Magnolia will audition Julie’s Negro song, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and (this is not in the novel) quickly rise to international celebrity, with a montage of playbills to prove it. But before that happens, we will bear witness to Helen Morgan’s transcendent moment, singing a number that Kern had originally written with P. G. Wodehouse in 1917, “Bill,” accompanied here by the excitable, uncredited former Rhythm Boy Harry Barris.



Again, Whale rises to the occasion. Morgan’s performance is three and a half minutes long, and in that time the director uses thirteen discrete shots of Morgan, ranging from medium three-shots, including Barris and Charles C. Wilson (who plays the producer Mr. Green), to waist-up portraits of Morgan, to extreme close-ups of her face: chin to brow, eyes glistening. The impeccable editing emphasizes different passages of the song (verse, chorus, bridge). Whale additionally uses eight insert shots as the room fills up with show-business personnel and tearful cleaning women gathering quietly to hear Julie. In all, twenty-one shots, only the last of them a long one encompassing Morgan, Barris, Wilson, and the extras, with an ominously empty dance floor dead center. Morgan walks out of the frame, not acknowledging the applause, and the camera doesn’t follow her. Incredible scene.