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Show Boat (1951) More at IMDbPro »

The show covers a period of forty years, from the 1880's to the late 1920's (which is when the show actually premiered on Broadway). This means that everyone who is in their 20's and 30's at the beginning is at least 60 in the final scene, and Kim is a grown woman rather than a little girl. Cap'n Andy is supposedly in his 40's at the beginning of the story, and 82 at the end. This was the pattern also followed in the 1936 film version.

In the 1951 film version, only about five or six years pass, and all the adults look pretty much the same age at the end as they did at the beginning. Cap'n Andy, played by the then sixty-year-old Joe E. Brown, looks sixty (or perhaps sixty-five) throughout the film.

Three things:

1) The "N" word was included in it (the first two lines were "Niggers all work on the Mississippi; niggers all work while the white folks play"). The word has been changed to what was considered a more acceptable term in later revivals as well as the 1936 film version and the 1989 television version - although the 1936 film did use the now unacceptable word "darkies" instead of "niggers". Most stage revivals, including the 1989 television version, now use the term "colored folks".

2) The opening chorus was not completely a lighthearted piece intended to make the audience forget their problems, as most opening choruses in shows were, back in 1927 when the musical premiered on Broadway. The very first thing the audience heard and saw was the dock workers singing about how difficult their work was.

3)This was the first show in which African-Americans and whites sang together in unison onstage.

No. In the show, the first half of it is sung by the black dock workers (who are referring to the "cotton blossom" growing on the levee rather than the boat, which is named Cotton Blossom), and the second half of it is sung by the white townspeople waiting to see the troupe of actors and the show boat parade. The song ends with both groups singing different lyrics simultaneously. In more modern productions, because of advances in stage machinery, the song begins before the boat's arrival, and concludes as the boat actually pulls into the dock, whereas productions up until the late 1960's had the boat already onstage as the curtain went up .

In the 1936 film, because the name of the boat was changed to Cotton Palace, the section of the song sung by the townspeople was omitted. The section sung by the dock workers was begun over the film's opening credits, and segued into the opening scene.

In the 1951 M-G-M film, the number is sung and danced by a chorus on the show boat in colorful costumes, who dances down the boat gangplank and onto the dock, not by the townspeople or the dock workers. Partly because of this, some of the lyrics are changed. The section sung by the dock workers is omitted in the film.

In the 1946 M-G-M biography of Jerome Kern, "Till The Clouds Roll By", the number is sung nearly complete, and more or less as it is done in the stage version, though the dock workers seem improbably light-hearted.

In some ways, very different. The basic plotline of the show is followed, but only in a general way. The biggest change in the storyline is that when Ravenal abandons Magnolia in the 1951 film, their daughter Kim has not been born yet. (In the stage version and the 1936 film Kim is already a little girl when Ravenal leaves, and a grown woman when he returns. In the 1951 film, Kim is a small child when Ravenal returns.) And unlike the stage or the 1936 film version, Ravenal actually does meet Julie in a crucial new scene near the end of the film.

Another change is that the "miscegenation" scene, in which it is discovered that Julie (Ava Gardner) is part-black and therefore illegally married to her white husband (Robert Sterling), is given much less shock value than in the play or the 1936 film. This is mostly due to the fact that when Steve draws blood from Julie so that he and Julie can claim that Steve too is part-black , he pricks Julie's finger with what looks like a tiny sewing pin, rather than cutting the back of her hand with a threatening-looking pocket knife.

The screenplay for the film throws out nearly all of Oscar Hammerstein II's original dialogue. Several new scenes not by Hammerstein have been added to this film, and the order of some of the songs has been shifted - for instance, "Ol' Man River" is sung much later here than in the original show or the 1936 film, and "Life Upon the Wicked Stage", which was not sung at all in the 1936 film, is here moved to the New Year's Eve sequence in Chicago rather than sung in Mississippi, as in the original show. It is also performed as a number on a stage, rather than 'in character", as in the show.