April 15 movie: Show Boat. Is this the earliest film version of Show Boat? It was made in the dawn of the sound era, and like The Jazz Singer was almost entirely silent, punctuated by a few musical numbers in full sound. Also the racial plot element had been completely removed.
You might be asking yourself, why would anyone watch a mostly-silent, bowdlerized version of Show Boat. Good question. I kept watching out of curiosity. The print they showed on TCM read like a sound movie for which most of the soundtrack was missing: it was totally silent, no music or anything, and also no intertitles. It had modern subtitles some of the time, and sometimes nothing at all to indicate what they were saying. I'm still not sure what was up with that. Also, I had never seen Joseph Schildkraut in a starring role before. He had a high-pitched voice with a German accent, and when I've seen him in soundies he usually played a villainous, conniving nobleman. The ambitious king's councillor in The Man in the Iron Mask, the vicious courtier in Marie Antoinette, that sort of thing. It was really interesting to see him as a romantic lead.
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