After Gaylord defends Julie with a single punch, he exits through a doorway. Julie asks the bartender for a drink. After downing the the drink, Julie modestly pulls up the short sleeves of her dress before following Gaylord. As the scene shift, Julie's sleeves are down; she then pulls up one sleeve.
When Julie Laverne is introduced, Queenie watches over from the spiral staircases. She disappears in one shot, but then reappears.
In some prints, Leif Erickson's name is misspelled (as Lief Erickson) in the opening credits.
When the Cotton Blossom is pulling away from the dock, at the end of the movie, you can see big clouds of blue smoke pouring out the right side of the ship (near the rear). These are definitely exhaust gases from either a gas or diesel engine that is installed in the ship, and most likely used to power the paddle wheel.
When there is a shot through the cabin door overlooking the river to the far bank, you can see a white trailer moving beyond the bank across the frame.
Some of the extras repeat in different settings. Judy Landon, a minor MGM contract player who would later become known as the wife of Brian Keith, can be seen as one of the showboat's chorus girls in the opening number (front and center when the girls sing about the leading man), as well as one of the chorus girls who talks to the director at the nightclub during Magnolia's audition to Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine.
when Ellie May and Frank discover Nolie in the apartment they're looking at, Nolie goes into the bedroom to find the note left by Gay. The note is laying open on the table with the money visible sitting on it. In the close up the note is closed and the money drops out of it as Nolie picks it up to read it.
In the opening scenes with the calliope player, the keyboard is a contemporary 1950's black console, whereas a period console would have been made of wood, and perhaps elaborately carved and detailed.
The show boat "Cotton Blossom" is inaccurately designed for the era in which the story takes place (the 1880's). The boat used in the film is built in the style of a typical modern luxury riverboat, with giant twin smokestacks and a large paddlewheel in the rear, and it moves on its own power. Modern "show boats" are built that way because of advances made since the 19th century, but authentic show boats of the era did not have smokestacks or paddlewheels, and were not self-powered. They were barge-like structures similar to a long, floating house with a flat roof, and they were connected to, and pushed along by the misleadingly named "towboats", which did have smokestacks and a paddlewheel. If a real show boat of the era had been steam-powered, its steam engine would have had to be placed (very dangerously) smack in the middle of the auditorium.
In the "Ol' Man River" sequence, after the boat has stopped moving to allow Ravenal to climb on board, it begins moving again and passes some dock workers on rafts. Joe is seen in long shot, standing on the deck of the show boat and singing to them the words "You an' me, we sweat and strain...", etc. During that specific moment, his voice is not quite synchronized with his arm and lip movements (he shakes his fists for emphasis). Then, on the line "Ya get a little drunk", he is shown in medium shot, and his voice matches his lip movements perfectly.
When the townspeople are rushing to see the show boat at the beginning, the camera crew's shadow is visible on the road.
Following a fistfight between leading man Steve Baker and Pete, the boat's engineer who has been making advances at Steve's wife, leading lady Julie La Verne, he vows revenge and storms through the crowd in a tracking shot, where the camera's shadow visible can be seen gliding over the extras.
Camera shadow visible on one side of the dock as the dancers first come out.
At one point, Magnolia (Kathryn Grayson) refers to Lady Southweight and Hamilton Barsdale as being characters in "Tempest and Sunshine", a melodrama adapted from a then-popular novel. There are no such characters in that play. In the scene in which Cap'n Andy (Joe E. Brown) introduces the show boat actors to the crowd, Julie (Ava Gardner) and Steve (Robert Sterling) make another reference to Hamilton, and Cap'n Andy then says: "You have to see the play tonight folks, to learn their secret - "Tempest and Sunshine", beautiful drama of tears and laughter".