The stage musical Show Boat is credited with bringing a new maturity to Broadway when it opened in 1927. Universal’s first film version, from 1929, was part talkie, part silent, and only included some of the score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. Besides retaining most of the score, Whale’s remake includes several cast members from the original Broadway production, notably Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan. Whale proves strikingly adept at both the musical numbers and the dramatic sequences, turning away from the romantic comedy that provides the narrative thread for so many 1930s musicals to instead offer a full-fledged drama about racism, miscegenation, failed marriages and human weakness among a performing troupe in the South around the turn of the twentieth century.