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.
