The Oscar Project #9: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

by Chris Marshall:

I’ll be honest. I was already biased against this movie before I ever started watching it. It’s a musical, and it’s over three hours long.  Neither of those things inspired much optimism in me. I knew it would be a chore to make it through the whole thing.

But it was worse than that. After the movie started with a 4 minute, 51 second musical overture, followed by over 2 minutes of opening credits, I could tell it was going to be a struggle. And then a truly pernicious thing happened; the first 45 minutes were actually pretty good! William Powell, playing Florenz Ziegfeld of Ziegfeld Follies fame, put the team on his back and made it more entertaining than it had any right to be.

This sounds like a positive, but it was pernicious because it lulled me into a false sense of security. I would have preferred it just be bad all the way through rather than getting my hopes up and pulling the rug out from underneath me. The last two hours of the movie were mostly just footage of Ziegfeld’s stage productions.

This wasn’t a musical in the traditional sense, where the songs play some role in furthering the plot. No, these scenes were here just as a way to say “Look what we can do!” That was also the case in The Broadway Melody, but to director Harry Beaumont’s credit, he knew that sometimes less is more. He showed two or three short numbers, and we got the idea. Richard Z. Leonard, the director of The Great Ziegfeld, decided we needed the entire production.

It’s a shame, too, because the film isn’t bad when it’s focused on Ziegfeld instead of his Follies. Powell is incredible, as are Myrna Loy and Luise Rainer, the latter of whom won Best Actress for the role, despite her extremely limited screen time. I think that says a lot; in a 185 minute movie, she won an Oscar for about 15-20 minutes of work.[1] The story itself wasn’t the problem. It was the execution. In the right hands, this could have been salvaged.

But as it was, it was nigh unwatchable, unless you’re just really into early 20^th century Broadway. If you don’t believe me, check out what even the “fresh” reviews on Rotten Tomatoes had to say:

“Overlong, overblown biopic with a pair of flawless stars.” –Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress
“What can you do with a movie like this? Surrender, I guess.” –TV Guide’s Movie Guide
“It's huge, overbudget, dazzling, and entertaining, but you'd be hard-pressed to remember more than one or two of the characters or specific events.” –Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Goatdog Movies

Oh, and there's this, too.

Not exactly the most prestigious sources for those reviews, either. And it’s hard to imagine what Mr. Phillips found to be “entertaining,” but I digress. This was by far the most difficult movie for me to get through out of the 15 I’ve watched so far for this project. It was the only one that made me throw my hands up in the air and wonder what I was doing with my life. Dear readers, if you take nothing else away from this enterprise, at least listen to me when I tell you not to watch this movie.

I take nothing away from Powell, Rainer, and Loy, who did everything in their power to save this thing. They are about the only people involved who don’t have blood on their hands. It’s not their fault that this was, to use a line from Roger Ebert’s review of Pearl Harbor, a “two hour movie squeezed into three hours.”

I like to close on a positive note, though. The next seven winners (at least) after this one range from decent to great. They’ve started to be really fun to watch, and I’m so glad I persevered through this travesty. Tomorrow’s film, The Life of Emile Zola, was such a pleasant surprise. I have survived.

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[1] Amazingly, as of this article’s posting, Luise Rainer is still alive. At age 102, she is the oldest surviving Oscar winner. She also won Best Actress the following year for The Good Earth.