Lame 2nd film version of Kern and Hammerstein's awesome jazz opera disappointed me a great deal. I expected a lot more from A. Freed as a producer. Only Keel is well cast, and they don't even have him sing "You are Love." This is just one of the many atrocities, including Ava Gardner limping through a role played definitively by Helen Morgan. Joe E. Brown's face lighting up as he sees his daughter in the bar, tears coming down his face, may haunt me in nightmares. <br /><br />Only the excellent music of the original musical provides an incentive to watch this film. Universal's 30s version is better, but also not comparable to the musical. This is a case where the scope of the original product is simply too great for a film; even most production of Show Boat as a stage musical skip many of the show's better tunes, especially the jazzier songs Kern supplied for the play's last act, which were intended to show the progress of time. <br /><br />The most objectionable aspect is the film's racism, which carries Hammerstein's often patronizing but usually "liberal" viewpoint into the area of an insult. By way of illustrating this trend, by which each film version become successively more racist than the original musical, we can look at the opening scene where Julie's jealous admirer takes back his present from Queenie (to whom Julie had given the trinket). In the stage play, the white man accosts Queenie and asks her where she got it, and Queenie refuses to tell him and walks off in a huff. In Universal's film, Hattie McDaniel plays with less dignity, but still shows some anger when the white man demands return of his jewelry. In MGM's color version, however, it has become even more offensive: in this version, the black woman cowers in fear as the big white man simply snatches the necklace off her person. This progression should amply illustrate the degeneration of the script's attitude from Hammerstein's condescending liberalism to MGM's stereotyped racism.<br /><br />All surface and no substance to this pallid MGM musical product.