Carnival Boat (1932)
Directed by Albert S. Rogell

Film Review

Carnival Boat features not one but two stars-in-the-making who would soon become legends in their own life time: Ginger Rogers and William Boyd.  A year on, Rogers would begin her enduring partnership with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio (1933); in 1935, Boyd first took on the role for which he is best known, Hopalong Cassidy, in the first of a series of popular westerns.  The future celebrity of its two most prominent actors gives Carnival Boat an interest value it might otherwise not have, although it does have one or two other virtues, not least of which are two remarkable action sequences.

Filmed mostly on location in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Carnival Boat sometimes feels more like a documentary than a melodrama, and its depiction of lumber work in the 1930s confers on it some historical value.  The dramatic highpoint is a thrilling sequence involving a runaway train, which is almost surpassed by another nail-biting sequence in which the hero (Boyd) has to clear a log jam (in the original sense of the term).  Whilst Boyd is busy doing all the hard man stuff, Rogers is playing the glamour girl for all it is worth, rewarding both the eye and the ear with her sprightly rendition of the song How I Could Go For You?

© James Travers 2013

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Film Synopsis

Aware that he is getting too old to run his lumber business, Jim Gannon has hopes that his son Buck will take over when he retires.  But Buck has other ideas.  He has fallen in love with a pretty showgirl, Honey, and plans to leave the area and start a new life with her.  When he realises how much his father is counting on him, Buck has a change of heart, just as a series of near-disasters head his way...