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Friday February 04, 2022

Movie Review: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Has anyone thought about remaking this? Yes, we should pause before remaking a Best Picture winner, but: 1) it shouldn’t have won in the first place, not over “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” for example, or the unnominated “Modern Times”; and, 2) it gives us the Louis B. Mayer and Joseph Breen version of the life and times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. Meaning we barely get the life and times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. 

What is Ziegfeld known for? Putting on lavish shows with scantily clad women and apparently schtupping many of them. MGM loses the scantily clad and don't even think schtup. William Powell’s version of Ziegfeld isn’t charmingly rakish, he’s just charming. When it comes to women, he’s actually more acted upon than acting. 

Shame. A few years earlier, at Warner Bros. rather than MGM, we might’ve seen a helluva show.

Whither Williams I
At least the movie skips the childhood that informs the adult. We get right into Ziegfeld’s carnival-barker battle with his rival. Billings (Frank Morgan, the Wizard of Oz himself) has the girls, curvaceous belly dancers and “Little Egypt” dressed in veils, while Ziegfeld just has a strongman, Sandow (Nat Pendleton, underrated), performing “feats of strength.” He’s strong but sex is stronger, and Ziegfeld loses the crowds. Until he realizes Sandow has sex appeal, too. That’s the first back-and-forth with Billings.

The second is over French songstress Anna Held (Luise Rainier, third-billed, who would win the Oscar for best actress), and, again, Billings starts with the upper hand. But Ziegfeld charms his way into her life, her career and her heart. He not only wins her as an employee but as a wife. Or a kind of wife? In real life, they simply had a common-law marriage. In fact, Held is the one who suggested that Ziegfeld do an American version of the Folies Bergère, which began in 1907 and was forever named “The Ziegfeld Folllies” beginning in 1911. It was a hugely successful revue with some of the great talent of the era: Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor and Bert Williams.

Here, Brice plays herself (singing “My Man” in a shawl), Buddy Doyle plays Cantor (singing “If You Knew Susie” in blackface), A.A. Trimble plays Rogers (doing rope tricks backstage and talking in a homespun manner), and no one plays Bert Williams, the great Black American vaudevillian, who often performed in blackface himself, and whom James Cagney considered the greatest performer he ever saw. I guess MGM thought Cantor’s blackface was enough. Instead, Ray Bolger plays Ray Bolger, stagehand with a dream, even though Bolger never worked for Ziegfeld. Williams, who performed in the Follies almost every year in the 1910s, simply gets namechecked:

Frazzled stage manager: What follows this number?
Assistant: [Looking through book] Uh…
Frazzled stage manager: Yeah, yeah, I know: Bert Williams. But have the finale costumes arrived yet?

Sadly, the subtitles get the namecheck wrong.

Whither Williams II
Did I mention this thing is three hours? The biggest production number, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” occurs about 1/3 of the way through, and apparently it set all kinds of records. It’s eight minutes long, involves lavish spiral staircases, and 180 dancing girls who mostly just walk. I think L.B. Mayer thought it was classy but now it’s just over-the-top and cornball.

I like all the “Wizard of Oz” connections. Not just Morgan and Bolger but Ziegfeld’s third-act romance, Billie Burke, who played Glynda in “Oz,” and who is played by Myrna Loy here. Burke had the rights to Ziegfeld’s story and personally picked Powell and Loy. Normally I love Powell, but he’s altogether too glib here, and too all-knowing considering the financial troubles Ziegfeld had. He skirts above everything.

Is this film’s success what made Hollywood think of doing a biopic on Ziegfeld’s contemporary, George M. Cohan? And were other biopics of turn-of-the-century Broadway impresarios made in the 1930s and ’40s? MGM kept returning to Ziegfeld anyway, with “Ziegfeld Girl” appearing in 1941 (about three 1920s-era Ziegfeld performers), and with Powell reprising the role in 1945’s “Ziegfeld Follies.” Per IMDb: “The late, great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. looks down from Heaven and ordains a new revue in his grand old style.” Pass.

Ziegfeld also appeared in biopics of some of his stars. He was played by Eddie Kane in “The Jolson Story” (1946), by William Forrest in “The Story of Will Rogers” (1952), by Forrest again in “The Eddie Cantor Story” (1953), by Walter Pidgeon in “Funny Girl,” and by Paul Stewart in “W.C. Fields and Me.” Missing from this list of biopics? Bert Williams again.

OK, scratch remaking this one. I'd rather see the Williams biopic.

Posted at 08:09 AM on Friday February 04, 2022 in category Movie Reviews - 1930s