THE GREAT ZIEGFELD

The Oscar for Best Picture award in 1937 was for the movie The Great Ziegfeld, a bio picture about the legendary Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.

The movie starts out in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair as Ziegfeld navigates his initial entry into show business. More a P.T. Barnum-type con artist, Ziegfeld starts out promoting and exploiting The Great Sandow, a German bodybuilder. Ziegfeld (William Powell) is rather unscrupulous when it comes to acquiring what he wants and spends most of his life robbing Peter to pay Paul. After severing his relationship with Sandow, he manages to convince a rising French singing star to sign a contract and return with him to the United States. Anna Held (Louise Rainer) is a hit and eventually helps inspire Ziegfeld to start his Ziegfeld Follies shows that were legendary on Broadway from 1907 through the 1930s. Ziegfeld and Held became lovers but would eventually end their common-law marriage. He would go on to marry Billie Burke (Myrna Loy), the actress who would play Glinda in the Wizard of Oz.

Powell and Rainer are wonderful inhabiting the roles of these two real-life characters. Rainer in particular steals the focus of every scene that she graces. She would be awarded the Oscar for Best Actress for this role. Myrna Loy and Frank Morgan (as Jack Billings) also provide some great performances opposite William Powell, though their roles are significantly smaller.

When Ziegfeld produces the first of his “Ziegfeld Follies” (about halfway through the 3-hour film) the movie begins to suffer. The first Follies musical number, “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” is an amazing visual gift. It includes over 100 performers, extravagant costumes, and a stage set that revolves around and up like a giant wedding cake, with silk curtains draping over and over. It provides the viewer with a peek into what the actual stage productions of the Ziegfeld Follies were like. After this routine however, the viewer is then forced to sit through numerous other elaborate musical numbers, many included for the sole purpose of showing off several real-life Follies’ performers who appear in cameo roles as themselves. These include Ann Pennington, Ray Bolger, Gilda Gray, Fannie Brice, Harriet Hoctor, and Leon Errol. The movie itself seems to lose sight of whether it is The Great Ziegfeld or if it wants to be The Great Ziegfeld Follies. Spectacle tramples substance.

This movie is a wonderful example of the lavish and golden era of Hollywood, and it is a great introduction to Florenz Ziegfeld and his contributions to American theater. I just wish it had been edited down a bit, regardless of how entertaining all the solo cameo musical numbers were.