Cinema Hype

I tried not to put off watching The Great Ziegfeld, the Best Picture for 1936. After all, I’d just gotten back my momentum after quitting and starting again hiatus, and I do love a musical with large, expensive song-and-dance numbers. But then Pauline Kael had to go and say mean things about it—”It goes on for a whopping three hours, but through some insane editing decision Fanny Brice is cut off in the middle of singing ‘My Man’…a lavish, tedious musical biography,” she said—and it languished by the DVD player for a few weeks before I finally summoned the strength to watch it.

Kael gets the salient points right: lavish, musical biography, three hours, Fanny Brice cut off mid-song. As for the “tedious” comment…maybe, but to be fair, nothing here is either more or less compelling than any other overlong biopic. If anything, The Great Ziegfeld (the story of Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, of The Ziegfeld Follies fame) is probably more the granddaddy of movies like Ali and The Aviator than anything else. Nothing really happens, per se, but then that’s sort of the problem with a lot of biopics: people with interesting lives don’t necessarily adhere to the kind of beginning-middle-end sequencing that we’re so used to. Aren’t all biopics at least a little boring?

Then there’s the catch-22 of the musical numbers. The Great Ziegfeld is three hours and six minutes long, and punctuated by examples of Ziegfeld’s famously extravagant musical numbers. By fast-forwarding, the impatient viewer can shorten the running time by twenty minutes, easy (by “musical numbers” we’re not talking “They’re Doing Choreography”; more like enormous, round parade floats rotating onstage). But fast-forwarding here is a little like munching on raisin bread and eating around the raisins. If you’re going to watch three hours of this guy’s life, shouldn’t the musical numbers sweeten the deal? I suppose it depends on the crowd and the crowd’s affinity for ladies singing under parasols. I’ll leave it up to you.

As for Kael and the Fanny Brice complaint, I’ve got to agree, and extend it to the supporting cast. William Powell doesn’t do much to distinguish himself here as Ziegfeld, but he’s surrounded by apparent geniuses doing what they do best. First, there’s Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz three years later, practically dancing holes in the stage; then there’s Luise Rainer, who won the award for Best Actress (and won again the next year), as Ziegfeld’s star-struck first wife. And finally there’s Brice, who’s like watching Gilda Radner’s grandmother, and who’s like a jolt of comic energy in the middle of all the languid chorus girls and their parasols. Fantastic.

With 82 years of hindsight since the 1936 Academy Awards, it’s fairly obvious that The Great Ziegfeld had to win Best Picture. It was MGM’s most expensive movie to date—production cost $2 million—and the investment paid off in terms of spectacle and later in terms of box office success. Maybe it wasn’t the best picture of the year (surely also-ran My Man Godfrey beats it for plot and dialogue?), but it sure was the biggest.

The Great Ziegfeld, Florenz Ziegfeld, 1936, Academy Awards, Project 501, William Powell, Luise Rainer, Ray Bolger, Fanny Brice