Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 2, 1951

Show Boat (M-G-M), launched as a novel by Edna Ferber 25 years ago and as a Broadway musical hit a year later, has steamed across the screen twice before, in 1929 and 1936, but never with such a lavish hand at the helm. M-G-M poured $2,400,000 into the latest voyage, refitted the venerable Cotton Blossom with a bight profusion of crisply Technicolored costumes, sets and vistas. The memorable Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II score (Ol' Man River, Make Believe, Why Do I Love You?) is as dependable a mainstay as ever. But never has Show Boat seemed so filled to the scuppers with corn.

From its early shots of happy darkies singing in the shining cotton fields, through the melodramatic confrontations, the heartbroken farewells, the whirlwind romance between Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal, and the sharp descent from riches to poverty, down to the final succession of coincidental reunions, the story is smothered in old-fashioned treacle and tears.

The movie is hardly more fortunate in its casting. Kathryn Grayson and Howard (Annie Get Your Gun) Keel, playing Magnolia and Ravenal, lift good voices in Composer Kern's buoyant songs, but Actress Grayson is less than entrancing as the belle of the Cotton Blossom, and Actor Keel's impression of a well-born river gambler's courtliness and dash looks like self-conscious make-believe. Ava Gardner, if occasionally out of her dramatic depth, has no trouble looking her part as the sensuous Julie. But she half-whispers Helen Morgan's old numbers (Bill, Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man) in a small voice which, for all its amplification on the sound track, sounds as if it would not actually be audible across the show boat's footlights.

Negro Baritone William Warfield helps things along for a while with a surefire performance of Ol' Man River. And at welcome intervals during its uneven course between timeless songs and dated story, Show Boat brings on the dancing of Broadway's Marge and Gower Champion, whose bounce and grace (notably in Life Upon the Wicked Stage) give the production its smoothest sailing.

Sirocco (Santana; Columbia) operates strictly on the old merchandising maxim that the best product is one that has already proved itself with the customers. Tricked out with a few new flourishes, this sales-tested item has been manufactured with exactly the same dies that stamped out Humphrey Bogart's successful Casablanca in 1942.

Again Bogart plays a cynical, self-seeking neutral in an exotic city where the gallant and the shifty engage in life & death intrigues and a beautiful woman wants desperately to escape through a police blockade. Again Cynic Bogart rises in the last reel to a noble, sacrificial gesture, accommodated by a switch in character that should convince no one but the accountants who added up the script.

This time the glamorous lady in distress is not Ingrid Bergman but Marta Toren, playing the disenchanted mistress of an idealistic French colonel (Lee J. Cobb), and the scene is Damascus in 1925 under the cloud of bitter French-Syrian warfare. Gun-Runner Bogart runs afoul of Colonel Cobb in both love & war, while a murky gallery of black marketeers, informers and Arabian fanatics (Zero Mostel, Nick Dennis, Onslow Stevens, et al.) snuffles ominously through the background.