Show Boat (1929)

Directed by

Arch Heath, Robbie Baldwin Ross, Harry A. Pollard

Genre

silent film, musical film, romance film

Country

United States

Runtime

2h 26m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 4 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A romance unfolds on a Mississippi riverboat where a show troupe performs. The story follows the captain's daughter as she falls for a gambler and faces family secrets.

historicsentimentallanguidromanticmusicalmelodramaticdatedearnest

What happens

Show Boat is a 1929 American pre-Code sound part-talkie romantic drama film based on the 1926 novel Show Boat by Edna Ferber. The film initially did not use the 1927 stage musical of the same name as a source, but scenes were later added into the film incorporating two of the songs from the musical as well as other songs. Many of these songs from the stage show were featured in a special prologue that was added to the picture before it was released. This film was produced and released by Universal. Like the majority of films during the early sound era, a silent version was made for movie theatres that had not yet converted to sound. The film was long believed to be lost, but most of it has been found and released on LaserDisc and shown on Turner Classic Movies. Like most early sound films the film was released in both sound-on-disc and sound-on-film versions. A number of Vitaphone type records for the sound-on-disc version were located in the mid-1990s. The soundtrack for the film was originally recorded using the sound-on-film Western Electric process and transferred to the disc format for those theatres that did not have the capability of playing the sound-on-film format. Two more soundtrack records were discovered in 2005. As a film first published in 1929, it entered the public domain on January 1, 2025. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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