The video version of this review can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAVGSLnEuGI
One of the hard things about doing a long series about films that are hailed as some of the greatest of all time is, believe it or not, having so many good films. It can quickly get quite dull saying how good film after film is. For varieties sake, it can be nice just to criticize a bad movie from time to time. It being a few months since I reviewed Cavalcade (1933) (one of the two Best Picture winners I really disliked up to this point), part of me was actually hoping for an awful movie again to spice things up, and well, I did ask for it.
The Best Picture winner of 1936, The Great Ziegfeld, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning three: Best Picture, Best Actress for Luise Rainer, and Best Dance Direction (an award that was only in existence from 1935-1937). While I don’t think the film deserved the first two awards, it did deserve the latter as well as the Best Art Direction award it didn’t win.
If you haven’t already guessed from the title, The Great Ziegfeld is the mostly-true biopic (the first ever to win Best Picture) of the life and career of Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld, Jr., founder of the Ziegfeld Follies and producer of many musicals such as Showboat. Ziegfeld is played by William Powell, who is probably best known for the extremely popular Thin Man series that he starred in with Myrna Loy – who also stars in this movie as Ziegfeld’s second wife Billie Burke (Burke being the actress who played Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz). The movie also features Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s first wife Anna Held, and Frank Morgan (also known as the title character in The Wizard of Oz) as an old friend/competitor of Ziegfeld’s.
Left: Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld (William Powell) and his second wife, Billie Burke (Myrna Loy). Right: Ziegfeld’s first wife, Anna Held (Luise Rainer).
Let’s get this out of the way: this film is way too long, and I mean waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. It clocks in at a little over three hours, the longest Best Picture yet, and it really shouldn’t. As it stands, the movie lacks proper focus and many scenes could’ve benefited from being shortened and more to the point. This movie has so many drawn out scenes that if it were any more drawn out, you’d need a piece of paper as long as the Americas just to fit them all. By the time the film got to the touching final moments of Ziegfeld’s life, I had mostly ceased caring by that point. It’s almost as if the editor couldn’t bear to cut one single frame out of a film that had no business being any longer than two hours.
Even if this was shorter, however, it still might not be all that good due to its mostly unlikeable main character. I don’t know how good of a guy Ziegfeld was in real life (supposedly he did commit quite a few infidelities), but in the movie he’s portrayed as a womanizing producer and showman who is constantly asking people for money and/or conning them out of it. I’m not sure whether or not the filmmakers were trying to show he was flawed or if they wanted his conning to be comedic and lovable. If it’s the latter, then they failed miserably since he comes off as a jerk. If it was the former, then they still botched it up. Yeah, we see he isn’t perfect, but if you’re portraying a character like that, you still need to make the us care enough about him for us to want to watch a whole film about him.
Normally, I would thank the stars that this is a musical and thus can give me a reprieve from the story and the characters with some entertaining song and dance sequences, but this picture manages to rob me of even that. Don’t get me wrong, the musical numbers sound good for the most part and look fabulous with their extravagantly massive sets, (generally) beautiful costumes, and well-written songs. The problem is these numbers suffer the same issue as the rest of the film and go on far, far too long.
A portion of one of “The Great Ziegfeld’s” enormously lavish musical sets.
There’s one such section about half-way through that goes on for 19 minutes. That’s right – 19 minutes. This musical interlude, with only a two minute character scene breaking it all up in the middle, lasts almost as long as your standard sitcom episode. Maybe if these numbers had more to do with the story beyond showing the audience how enormous and lavish Ziegfeld’s shows were, then maybe I could excuse this, but they don’t. Like action scenes, audiences need to be given time to breathe between musical numbers, otherwise you run the risk of exhausting them. After 19 straight minutes of songs, I was so tired I was begging to go back to the story I wasn’t even enjoying all that much.
Well, this is partly a comedy. Maybe I can get a few laughs out of this. What? Most of the jokes don’t work, and instead of making us think the characters are sarcastic but relatable scamps, the characters come off as uninteresting or boring? Nevermind then.
From all the dislike I’m piling onto this film, it may seem like this would be the bottom of the barrel Best Picture wise. I can assure you, kind reader, it is not. It’s not that high, mind you, but it certainly has more good bits than The Broadway Melody and Cavalcade.
The aforementioned musical numbers are overly long but otherwise good. A highlight of the film, nay the best part of the film, is a dance number by actual former Follies performer Ray Bolger (better known as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz), who plays himself in the movie. It is amazing to behold, and if ever there was a demonstration of how good a dancer Bolger was, it is this sequence. There is also a good scene having to do with Ziegfeld and the stock market crash and some touching moments with various supporting characters, particularly the final scene with Powell and Morgan.
Held (Rainer) who has a memorably sad scene near the end of the film.
These good aspects are very nearly drowned in the sea of stretched out material. It’s funny – this film was actually nominated for Best Editing. Yes, you heard me right, Best Editing. If there was an award this film didn’t even deserve to be considered for, it’s editing. When I look at this movie, I don’t see amazing editing work. I see a film that felt as if it didn’t have much story to work with and so had all its scenes and musical sequences elongated in an effort to mask it. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
What the moviemakers ended up with was a picture in desperate need of an editor, a more relatable main character, better written comedy, and songs that weren’t so exhausting in length. Do I see why it won? Yes. Is it a great film? No. Do I ever want to watch the whole thing again? Definitely not. If you want to get a glimpse of the life of Ziegfeld and how amazing his shows were, you may want to check this out, but be ready for a long haul. If you’re turned off by padding in movies, then you probably want to skip this one.
The Cinematic Packrat 