88
Metascore
10 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- Master director Whale, here essaying his first musical, does some typically marvelous things with the camera and mise-en-scene and gets wonderful performances from his cast.
- 100The New York TimesFrank S. NugentThe New York TimesFrank S. NugentUniversal's excellent screen transcription, preserving the Jerome Kern score and accepting Oscar Hammerstein's book and lyrics, is the pleasantest kind of proof that it was not merely one of the best musical shows of the century but that it contained the gossamer stuff for one of the finest musical films we have seen.
- 90Los Angeles TimesKevin ThomasLos Angeles TimesKevin ThomasIt is a stylish, durable piece of epic Americana, replete with some of the most beloved songs in musical theater and rich in its sense of period. [15 Jul 1985, p.2]
- 88Slant MagazineKeith WatsonSlant MagazineKeith WatsonA surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.
- 88Chicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumChicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumJames Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist.
- 80The DissolveKeith PhippsThe DissolveKeith PhippsEven with material as strong as Show Boat, Whale recognizes he’s making a film, not just a record of a stage production.
- 80Time OutTime OutWhale does superbly by this much-loved Kern-Hammerstein musical, abetted by modestly handsome sets and lustrous camerawork from John Mescall.
- 80Show Boat, Universal’s second talkerized version, is a smash filmusical. Basic tender romance [from Edna Ferber’s novel] between Magnolia (Irene Dunne) and Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones), romantic wastrel of the Mississippi river banks, has been most effectively projected by this reproduction of the classic [1927] Edna Ferber-Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern operetta.
- 80The New YorkerPauline KaelThe New YorkerPauline KaelThis classic musical-melodrama with the Jerome Kern songs and the novelistic Edna Ferber plot, full of heartbreaks and miscegenation and coincidences, is hard to resist in any of its versions.