Best Picture Winner: #9
Original Release Date: April 8, 1936
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 2 hours, 56 minutes
Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Quick Impressions:
I love William Powell and Myrna Loy. When I first started dating my husband and introduced him to classic movies, The Thin Man series charmed him immediately, and we tried to adopt the witty banter of Nick and Nora Charles (and in our own minds succeeded). I thought I had seen every film pairing of the popular screen couple. But you know what? Somehow, I had not seen The Great Ziegfeld. I cannot account for this. Both my mother and grandmother loved Powell and Loy, and I’m not aware that either had anything against Ziegfeld. Certainly they were fans of Billie Burke.
Doing this project with my daughter has opened my eyes to just how many Best Picture winners I’ve missed. Fast forward to about 1980, and suddenly I’ve seen them all (with the glaring exception of Spotlight. By the time we get to that one in sequence, my daughter will be old enough to watch it with me). But in the 20s and 30s in particular, my track-record is much better with Oscar winning and nominated performances than with Best Picture winners. I’m enjoying discovering these films.
I’ve never heard great things about Ziegfeld (the film), but going in, I thought anything staring Powell and Loy must be highly watchable. If you want to see them together in The Great Ziegfeld, though, you must be patient, extremely patient.
Because this film is basically three hours long, we watched it in two parts on consecutive nights. We tend to watch together late at night after most of the household has gone to bed, and I didn’t think my daughter would survive a three hour screening. Watching this way made two things abundantly clear. 1) Luise Rainer is the breakout star of the film, and 2) The first half of this movie is ten thousand times stronger than the second.
The Plot:
This first biopic to win Best Picture tells the life story of famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., known for his eponymous Follies. We see Ziegfeld’s rise from a frustrated young man who can never seem to hold onto money to a highly celebrated producer and household name who is still flat broke. Along the way, we get a look at the drama of Ziegfeld’s personal life as well as select scenes from his greatest triumphs on the stage.
The Good:
I love William Powell and Myrna Loy together (or apart), and Loy is the top billed female star, so I couldn’t wait for her to show up. Now going in, I expected to wait a little while to see Loy since she plays Billie Burke, who I knew perfectly well was Ziegfeld’s final wife and devoted widow. But at the ninety minute mark (where we stopped watching the first night), Loy still had not appeared.
Here’s what took me by surprise. I stopped wanting to see her. As it turns out, playing Ziegfeld’s first wife (at least as shown by this film) Anna Held, Luise Rainer is such a sparkling delight that I never wanted our time with her to end. I’ve heard good things about Rainer’s talents all my life. (And technically I’ve seen her before in The Good Earth as a young child, though I’ll confess I was not paying attention.) But now I’m extremely glad I’ve watched The Great Ziegfeld, just to see Rainer’s electrifying turn as Anna Held. (The movie has other fine qualities, too, but it’s 100 percent worth seeing just for that performance.) As I watched, Rainer seemed to come alive before my eyes. I could feel the vivacity of her living soul decades after she played the part, leaping out at me through my TV screen. Too often, I get used to watching movies and forget how magical they can be. How wonderful to see someone’s performance preserved this way, a living time capsule!
“She must have won an Oscar for this,” I kept telling myself, hoping so hard that she had. (I try each year to watch every performance likely to be nominated for Best Actress. Honestly, what the Academy is looking for hasn’t changed much.) After the first ninety minutes, I looked and discovered that Rainer did, in fact, win Best Actress for Ziegfeld. (She then won again for The Good Earth the very next year. Back-to-back wins for Best Actress didn’t happen again until Katharine Hepburn won for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1968, then The Lion in Winter in 1969. And that’s kind of crazy because in ’69, Hepburn tied with Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, and the real Fanny Brice appears as herself in The Great Ziegfeld. Now I hear The X-Files theme in my head. This is like a trivia question waiting to be discovered.)
I was so happy that Rainer had won the Oscar for such marvelous work that I thought about it all night. I kept wanting to share the glorious news, to burst out of my window like Scrooge on Christmas Day and start shouting down in wild excitement to people passing in the street.
When I finally got the opportunity to share the excellent news with my daughter, she was also really happy and not at all surprised. “She deserves it!” she exclaimed, her tone suggesting that anything else would have been ridiculous, insane.
My praise of Rainer probably seems a bit overstated at this point, but remember, we’re a dramatic family. She’s just so delightful in this role. She makes her character’s eccentricities so charming. The character is unintentionally hilarious, but the same energies that make her hilarious also make her so compelling and sympathetic.
Relatively late in the film, Rainer gets to make a telephone call in exactly the sort of way that Oscar voters would love. Here, she goes a trifle far for my tastes. I prefer the frenzied comedy of her earlier distress. But still, start to finish, she’s pretty magnificent.
My one complaint is that her character disappears from the movie too soon. (She’s actually in it for quite a long time, but any departure for such a sparkling personality is far too soon.)
You would think that once Anna Held fades away from Ziegfeld’s life, Myrna Loy would appear as Billie Burke to fill the void. But nope. Honestly, for a while I was starting to think Loy would show up in the end credits holding people’s names on cards or something. Waiting for her is a lot like waiting for Harrison Ford to show up in Blade Runner 2049. I didn’t keep time with a stop watch, but I swear she’s not in the movie until the last 30 minutes (45 tops).
Once Loy does finally appear, she’s excellent opposite William Powell as always and does (to a degree) make up for the final part of the film’s disappointing lack of Luise Rainer. My daughter remarked several times that she liked the Billie Burke character and Loy’s performance. To me, Loy doesn’t seem much like Billie Burke. (Certainly she does not sound like her, though she does sometimes seem to mimic her cadence.) But she is made up to resemble her a bit. That doesn’t matter much, though. Under any circumstances, Myrna Loy pairs perfectly with William Powell, just like gin and vermouth. They’re great on screen together.
And as for Powell himself, I just love him. If I’m being honest, I never watch William Powell and lose myself in the character. I always think, “Look! It’s William Powell!” I’m not saying he can’t act, but his star persona is so strong, and his diction is so delightful. Even before watching, I knew The Great Ziegfeld couldn’t be too bad, because–no kidding!–I would watch William Powell in anything. I’m always glad to see him. He could show up at my house right now, and I wouldn’t even ask any awkward questions like, “Aren’t you dead?” I would be thrilled he’d arrived to entertain me. I would watch him on screen for thirty three hours. And he’s quite good in this, as you would expect. His Ziegfeld is sympathetic even when roguish, and he does a marvelous job of aging the character as the story progresses.
Frank Morgan (aka the Wizard of Oz) is also delightful in this film, playing Ziegfeld’s oldest frenemy Jack. The odd love-hate relationship between these two is rich and complex. In fact, calling it “love-hate” is misleading. It’s mostly love. When Morgan’s character wrongs Ziegfeld, he initially seems like such a jerk. But when Ziegfeld wrongs him (again and again and again), he’s so bafflingly forgiving like he’s charmed in spite of himself by the man’s antics and can’t wait to see what ol’ Ziggy will do next.
In some ways, the film’s script is surprisingly compelling. I genuinely like the way the characters are drawn. We see who they are through their ridiculously repetitive behaviors. In some ways, it’s like watching a formulaic sitcom where every character has a catchphrase and a “thing.” Ziegfeld spends money immediately (sometimes sooner). Anna changes her mind. Jack swears Ziegfeld won’t trick him again, then loses another woman to him and loans him a large sum of money. Developing characters this way seems so reductive. And yet when we’ve seen the whole story, we really feel we understand these characters on some deeper level. And that’s kind of cool because this is a movie about a man who excels at producing extravagant stage shows (with impressive choreography and stunningly elaborate staging and sets). So it seems fitting that every character would play his or her carefully choreographed part, slowly revealing to us the whole amazing picture of the man’s life.
The actual numbers from Ziegfeld’s stage shows are pretty impressive, much better than I expected. (Certainly they put The Broadway Melody to shame.) There are so many slow reveals as a number begins simply and then evolves into a masterwork of creative staging. (“They’re standing on a giant wedding cake!”) I wish I had lived in the 1930s and had occasion to see the Follies on stage!
Often big, elaborate musical numbers like this delight me because they baffle me. For better or worse (and in the worse column belongs the crazy circus one), these numbers are undeniably remarkable. We also get to see the real Fanny Brice. (Too bad an actor plays Will Rogers, but the real Rogers had died the year before, a pretty good excuse for not appearing in the movie.) Ray Bolger (aka The Scarecrow) also does some impressive dance routines. (If you’re looking for a drinking game to make watching this more fun, drink every time you think of The Wizard of Oz.)
Best Scene:
By far the best scene in the entire film belongs to Luise Rainer. Her outrage over being sent twenty gallons of milk has to be one of the best things…I struggle to complete this sentence. The trouble is “that I’ve ever seen in 1930s film” feels like too risky a finish, yet somehow “that I’ve ever seen in my entire life” does not. Everything about Ziegfeld’s life was hyperbolic and dramatic, including Luise Rainer’s performance as the woman he loved and my reaction to that performance. The “twenty gallons of milk!” scene is perfection.
The difference between Luise Rainer’s work here and fine work I love by other stars in the 30s (like Katharine Hepburn, for example) is that I had never seen this performance before. Who would have thought something so wonderful could have existed since 1936, and I’ve only just discovered it now!
Sometimes I have strong reactions to movies…like when I first noticed Marilyn Monroe (as she was being pursued and killed by Joseph Cotten) and nearly fell down the stairs. Or the time when I was seven and confidently declared after watching twenty minutes of The Philadelphia Story that Katharine Hepburn was the greatest actress of all time. Or when I was late because I couldn’t take my eyes off To Have and Have Not (late to meet friends. I didn’t spontaneously conceive).
The point is, I only just discovered this performance by Luise Rainer, and it was so fantastic! (I’m probably overselling it, but I enjoyed this unexpected, new-to-me, amazing find so much.)
Another excellent scene is the final conversation between Frank Morgan’s Jack and Ziegfeld. These two are such a strange pair, but their final meeting is genuinely moving.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s not a traditional action sequence, but I do love the way Ziegfeld steals Anna Held from his friend Jack. She performs a song about playing a game. Clearly, the two men are playing a game with each other.
Best Scene Visually:
“A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” is an intensely captivating number visually. Our eyes and ears take a tour of the world, through space and time, and then suddenly we realize we’re on a wedding cake. It’s quite something.
Best Song:
It’s the choreography and staging that makes the musical numbers so impressive, much more so than the songs themselves. The costumes are also mind-blowing. My daughter liked a number performed by Ray Bolger best. This is such a long, involved number that it eventually evolves into what must be a separate number. The staging and choreography are incredible, as always, and Bolger’s skillful dancing is a pleasure to watch.
The Negatives:
The first ninety minutes of the movie are the best. By the second half, the film starts to seem a little bloated. One of the highlights of the second half is a sequence showing Ziegfeld’s discovery of Fanny Brice. Because Brice plays herself, this is absolutely fascinating to watch. It seems to pull us away from the main story, though.
To be blunt, once Luise Rainer fades from view, the film is not as good. It never really recovers from her loss. We see a lot of spectacle, but the story of Ziegfeld the man sort of flounders for a while.
Powell himself has enough screen presence and charisma to keep us interested, but the second half of the movie is just not as good overall (though Frank Morgan certainly does his part).
One problem is with Audrey Dane, played by Virginia Bruce. One minute, Audrey is portrayed as a scheming, cold-as-ice, would-be home-wrecker. The next she’s a failed star with an embarrassing drinking problem. And finally, she’s an actual home-wrecker who gets drunk and smashes elephants. This character is unpleasant, so while she’s in the story, her presence is grating and unwelcome. The worst part, though, is that I kept getting the feeling that there’s more to Audrey’s story than the movie will show us. She is an awful person. She has the dead-eyed look of a movie serial killer. But Ziegfeld’s problem with her seems to be that she’s embarrassing. Her willingness to accept diamonds and orchids and stardom (and surely more) from a married man is apparently not the issue. The problem is that she says rude, embarrassing things in public. If you listen to her drunken speech, she seems to imply that Ziegfeld began grooming her (for stardom and who knows what else) at a very early age. I guess the thing is, she was supposed to take what he gave her, do what he said, and be easy to control. There’s something inherently disturbing about this. She’s very unpleasant, so it’s hard to like her, but her presence seems like a pointed reminder that we’re getting a very sympathetic (and heavily censored) portrait of Ziegfeld.
Also, the number from Ziegfeld’s circus show near the end of the film is pretty weird. It is certainly not hard to see why that show was not a success. I’m not sure why the movie audience needs to see that number. Yes, it gives us insight into what has happened, but it is also awfully long.
The movie also contains blackface (just briefly, a portion of a musical number). Obviously, The Great Ziegfeld is chronicling actual, historical events, so I don’t blame the movie. (This is one of those things you blame on the society, not the film about the society.) I only mention it because to see blackface on screen now is such a jarring shock. That’s probably a good thing. It shows that while our society is still a huge mess, at least some things have changed. My daughter, for example, had never actually seen blackface before and found it rather shocking, which I think is a good thing. When I was just a year older than she is, we used to watch The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again all the time. I’ve often thought, “If I ever taught a college class again, I would build it around The Jolson Story.” Of course, I would be in no way qualified to teach that class, but what a fascinating topic! You could talk about blackface, antisemitism, immigration, cultural appropriation, religious/secular music, and the blacklisting of Larry Parks. And I mean, that’s just for a start! When I was a child, seeing historical blackface was a curiosity, but it’s been so many years that now it’s a bit of a shock even to me.
Overall:
The Great Ziegfeld is highly entertaining if overlong. The first half of the film is much stronger than the second, but William Powell is always a pleasure to watch. The staging of the musical numbers becomes more and more impressive and outlandish as the film progresses. But best of all is Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s wife Anna Held. If you see the film for no other reason, watch it for her performance. My daughter now ranks this fourth of the films we have seen, after Wings, It Happened One Night, and Mutiny on the Bounty. I’m already struggling to rank these films, but I will say this. While The Great Ziegfeld is by no means the best of these pictures, it is the one I’m presently most likely to watch again. (I won’t pay attention during the musical numbers, though.)