The Great Ziegfeld

Poster from a 1912 theatrical production of the Ziegfeld Follies

The screenplay by William Anthony McGuire was a "novelty" to many audiences who were familiar with the theatrical Broadway shows of the follies.[11] The script, although fictionalized with embellishments needed for the motion picture,[12] did show some accuracies in the life of Ziegfeld.[6] Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times said of the script: "What William Anthony McGuire has attempted in his screen play, and with general success, is to encompass not merely the fantastic personal history of Ziegfeld but the cross-sectional story of the development of the Follies, the Midnight Frolic on the New Amsterdam Roof and the other theatrical enterprises floated under the Glorifier's aegis during a span of about forty years. The two biographies—of the man and of his creations—are, naturally, inseparable; but both have been told with such wealth of detail and circumstance (real and imaginative) that even the three-hour film narrative is fragmentary and, in some places, confused."[13]

Although it has some accuracies, The Great Ziegfeld takes many key liberties with Ziegfeld's life and the history of the Follies, resulting in many inaccuracies.[14] The earlier scenes with Sandow, the milk bath advertising scenario, and many other sequences including several of the dramatic ups and downs of the film were fictional.[6] George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was never featured in the Follies, and the number "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" was written for the 1919 Follies,[15] not the first edition of the revue, as shown in the film. Ray Bolger was never cast in a "Follies" show,[14] and although she was born in the U.S, Billie Burke grew up in England and spoke with a Mid-Atlantic accent throughout her life; Loy who portrays her clearly has an American accent in the film.[16]

In the film, the last few lines of the song "Ol' Man River" (from Show Boat) are sung by what sounds like a tenor, while the song was intended for bass Paul Robeson and sung in the original production by bass-baritone Jules Bledsoe.[17] Further, the screenplay also gives the impression that the successful original production of Show Boat, which Ziegfeld produced, closed because of the Great Depression. In fact Show Boat ended its original 1927 run in the spring of 1929 and the stock market crash did not occur until October of that year. It was the 1932 revival of the show (also produced by Ziegfeld shortly before his death), not the original production, that was affected by the Depression.[18]

In real life, Ziegfeld did not die in his room at the Hotel Warwick (not mentioned) which stood in front of the Ziegfeld Theatre; he actually died in Los Angeles and had not even spent his last years in New York.[19] However, McGuire did capture a number of Ziegfeld's traits, such as sending telegrams to people even in close proximity, his belief that elephants were a symbol of good luck, his exquisite taste in costumes and design, and perfectionism over his productions, especially lighting and rostrum pedestaling.[6] McGuire's script, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, is dated September 21, 1935, probably the date when it was finalized.[20]

Marilyn Miller, who was rejected after exorbitant demands from the film producers, threatened to sue if her name were even mentioned in the film.

Initially, the main cast proposed for the film included Marilyn Miller, Gilda Gray, Ann Pennington, and Leon Errol.[4] Featured in the film are William Powell as Ziegfeld, Myrna Loy as Billie Burke, Luise Rainer as Anna Held, Nat Pendleton as Eugen Sandow, and Frank Morgan. Powell admitted to being "amazed" with the film after viewing it and was very grateful at having had the privilege to portray Ziegfeld, considering it to be a very important moment in his career. He said "After seeing this film I can see that most of the characters I have played before were contrived. They had no 'folks', as the character of Ziegfeld had in this picture. Their father was a pen and their mother was a bottle of ink. Here was a character with flesh, blood and sinews. I felt for the first time in my acting career I had tried the full measure of a man, regardless of my shortcomings in playing him."[21]

Many of the performers of the earlier Broadway version of the Ziegfeld Follies were cast in the film as themselves, including Fanny Brice and Harriet Hoctor, the ballet dancer and contortionist.[22] The Great Ziegfeld marked Rainer's second Hollywood film role after Escapade (also with Powell).[23] Fanny Brice appears as a comedian in the abridged song sequence "My Man" and played an effective version of herself in addition to her routine comic role as the funny girl.[4][24] Nat Pendleton, a freestyle wrestler who had won the silver medal at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp and had appeared alongside Powell in The Thin Man (1934), was cast as the circus strongman Eugen Sandow.

Billie Burke worked as a technical consultant on the film.

Billie Burke objected to her role being cast with another actress (Myrna Loy) since she was also an actress under contract to the studio and could play herself, but the producers concluded that at that point she was not a big enough star to play herself in The Great Ziegfeld. However, according to Emily W. Leider, Burke was not keen on playing her younger self and says that Billie Burke's biographer stated that Miriam Hopkins would have been her first choice to play her part, not Loy.[10] Burke herself worked as technical consultant, and although she did not object to Marilyn Miller performing a number, she was influential in the studio's refusal to give her the higher billing and salary she had demanded, which led to Miller walking away from the film.[25][12]

Both Miller and Lillian Lorraine threatened legal action if their names were so much as mentioned in the film.[12] Thus Miller's character was renamed Sally Manners, and Lorraine's character was renamed Audrey Dane (played by Virginia Bruce). In real life, Ziegfeld reportedly was obsessed with Miller, and was involved in numerous sex scandals.[26] In 1922, Miller had given an interview in which she accused him of "making love to chorus girls" and sending her a diamond ring as "big as her hand";[26] this essence of Ziegfeld's character is captured in the film. Incidentally, Miller died from toxicity complications after surgery just before the release of the film on April 7, 1936,[27] which led one reviewer writing in Liberty to denounce an urban legend which had arisen surrounding the timing of her death, writing "It's not true that Marilyn Miller died of a broken heart at not getting the lead in this." Another myth surrounding her untimely death at the age of 37 is that she had contracted syphilis.[27]

Frank Morgan, a stage and film character actor, played the role of promoter Billings in the film.[28] Dennis Morgan, in an uncredited role, performs in "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" (dubbed by Allan Jones). Pat Ryan, the future Pat Nixon, wife of Richard Nixon and First Lady of the United States, was an extra in the film.[29] Will Rogers was to appear in the film, but he was killed in a plane crash in August 1935. He was played by stand-in A.A. Trimble.[10][30]

The extravagant costumes, which even Ziegfeld initially considered too flamboyant, were designed by Adrian,[31] who had worked with many of the greatest actresses of the period, including Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford,[32] and later designed for films such as Marie Antoinette (1938), The Women (1939), and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Howard Gutner documents that due to MGM's wealth and the high budget, Adrian indulged in "sheer lavishness" in making the costumes, surpassing anything he had done previously.[31] It took 250 tailors and seamstresses six months to sew the costumes that Adrian had designed for the film, using 50 pounds (23 kg) of silver sequins and 12 yards (11 m) of white ostrich plumes.[8] The costumes worn by women in the film are diverse, varying from "puffy hooped skirts to catlike leotards" to "layers of tulle and chiffron", with the men mostly wearing black tuxedos.[9]

The extravagant "Wedding Cake" sequence featured a towering rotating volute of 70 ft diameter with 175 spiral steps, weighing 100 tons. This number, "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody", won the Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for 1936.

Leonard, a film director who specialized in melodrama and musicals, anchored the music for the film, working with Walter Donaldson, Irving Berlin, and lyricist Harold Adamson.[33] The extravagant dances and ensemble sequences were choreographed by Seymour Felix and Harold Adamson, including the song sequence of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" (it was Irving Berlin's 13th annual edition in 1919). The "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" set, known as the "Wedding Cake", involved several weeks of shooting time and was reported to have cost US$220,000 (US$4,053,381 in 2019 dollars[3]).[21][4] As many as 180 performers were involved in the scenes which included singers, dancers and musicians.[21] The sequence presented starts with "Rhapsody in Blue" and moves up the staircase as it rotates, revealing Virginia Bruce seated atop the tower, wearing a voluminous gown that spills over the edge. As the tower continues to turn, a satin curtain descends, enclosing each level in turn while the stage curtain slowly closes.[4][11]

The curtains, made of rayon silk, measured 4,300 yards (3,900 m).[14][21] Sheldon Hall and Stephen Neale note the theatrical sense that the cinematographers achieved through shooting the sequence in virtually a single take.[34] They mention that "the camera traverses an enormous platform set contained within a curtained proscenium (also enormous)", and that the "set itself revolves to meet the camera, rather than the camera entering the space of the set."[34] Linda Mizejewski, author of a book on the Ziegfeld girls, argues that the Pretty Girl sequence is more than just about being showy; it is symbolic of womanhood which "powerfully visualizes women as the raw material for male aesthetic vision and design".[35] In the film she believes that womanhood is defined by the "young, white, blond and slender" female, which in the sequence are "delineated as the fluffy, artificial tiers of costuming and staging".[35]

Actress and singer Virginia Bruce in The Great Ziegfeld.

The Harriet Hoctor ballet music was scored by Con Conrad to lyrics written by Herb Magidson. The circus ballet was an adaptation from the old Ziegfeld stage shows.[4][13] Variety called the Hoctor ballet "in itself intricate with its maneuverings of six Russian wolfhounds in terp formations",[6] and said that the "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" sequence in the film is a "nifty Berlin tune [which] becomes the fulcrum for one of Frank Skinner's best arrangements as Arthur Lange batons the crescendos into a mad, glittering potpourri of Saint-Saëns and Gershwin, Strauss and Verdi, beautifully blended against the Berlinesque background. It's a scenic flash which makes the auditor wonder 'What can they do to follow that?' meaning in this or future film production."[6] Juan Antonio Ramírez refers to the wedding cake as a "famous spiral column", citing it as one of the best known pieces of mobile architecture in film, but notes that in design the cake was not exclusive to The Great Ziegfeld, explaining that a wedding cake, albeit less flamboyant, had appeared in previous films such as King of Jazz (1930), The Kid from Spain (1932), Top Hat (1935), and Follow the Fleet (1936).[36] Ramírez describes the film's Mise en scène as representing "the last word in flashy vulgarity, Surrealist kitsch, or perhaps both at once".[36]

Selected songs

Farida Mahzar filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers shortly before her death, claiming that they "presented Little Egypt as a lewd character".[37] 14 witnesses who had seen the act at the 1893 Chicago World Fair supported this, although the lawsuit was dropped after Mahzar died from a heart attack.[37] Burke caused much controversy and upset among many of Ziegfeld's friends and colleagues when she sold the rights to a production on Broadway, the Ziegfeld Follies, also starring Fanny Brice, at the time the film was released in 1936, due to the fact that the show was produced by the Shubert brothers, whom Ziegfeld detested. Worse still for his associates, was that the show was a bigger success than Ziegfeld's last production of the Follies in 1931. The Ziegfeld Follies under Vincente Minnelli initially was performed in December 1935 before making its Broadway debut on January 30, 1936.[38] It was performed in Boston and Philadelphia until the production was postponed after Brice collapsed on stage with exhaustion.[38] When it reopened on Broadway in September 1936, five months after the release of the film, it was retitled The New Ziegfeld Follies of 1936–1937, and was revamped considerably, with changes to the show's humor.[38]

In 1941, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a sequel titled Ziegfeld Girl, starring James Stewart, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner, which recycled some film from The Great Ziegfeld. In 1946, MGM made another sequel, Ziegfeld Follies, directed by Vincente Minnelli, director of the stage show.[39]

According to MGM records, the film earned a then-massive $3,089,000 in the US and Canada and $1,584,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $822,000.[2]

It was the 5th most popular film at the British box office in 1935-36.[40]

The film, which premiered in Los Angeles at the Carthay Circle Theatre, was the first musical film in history for which one of its cast members won an Academy Award. Luise Rainer received the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Anna Held, Ziegfeld's first wife. The film, the pride of MGM at a time when Warner Brothers and RKO Pictures were the leading studios in Hollywood for musical production, was a major commercial and critical success and one of the most successful films of the 1930s, grossing US$4,673,000 (US$86,097,504 in 2019 dollars[3]) worldwide at the box office.[8] It was acclaimed upon release as the greatest musical biography to be made in Hollywood and still remains a standard in musical film making.[41] At just over three hours, The Great Ziegfeld was also the longest talking film of the time.[6] (D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, both silent films, had each run over three hours.) TCM has acclaimed the "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" sequence as one of "the most famous musical numbers ever filmed".[14] Thomas S. Hischak has said that the film has rarely been topped for pure showmanship and glamor, [11] and Variety considered it an "outstanding picture", a "symbol of a tradition of show business".[6] Variety praised the performances of the cast, remarking that as Ziegfeld, William Powell "endows the impersonation with all the qualities of a great entrepreneur and sentimentalist without sacrificing the shades and moods called for" and noting that Luise Rainer is "tops of the femmes with her vivacious Anna Held".[6] Stanley Green cited The Great Ziegfeld as "the first of a number of elaborate show-business screen biographies".[4] Otis Ferguson, writing for New Republic magazine, remarked that the "musical numbers seem as irresistible as Ziegfeld himself".[42] The New York American said that the film is "pretty nearly everything such an extravaganza should be", with "romance and reality, song and dance, gaiety and beauty, pathos and bathos".[43] Time qualified it as "Pretentious, packed with hokum and as richly sentimental as an Irving Berlin lyric, it is, as such, top-notch entertainment."[44] A reviewer for the Spokane Chronicle praised the film for its superb acting, writing that "[even] the great producer [Ziegfeld] would have been unable to produce scenes of magnitude and splendor that are given as part of the picture telling his life."[45] Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times was also highly praising of the film, noting that it had "more stars than there are in the heavens" and remarking that "the picture achieves its best moments in the larger sequences devoted to the Girls — ballet, chorus and show. At least one of these spectacular numbers, filmed to the music of Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody", with overtones of "Rhapsody in Blue", never has been equaled on the musical comedy stage or screen."[13] John Mosher of The New Yorker called it "the most lavish display the screen has had to offer" with chorus numbers that were "gigantic and effective", though he found the romance to be "peculiarly average screen-story stuff."[46] Both The New York Times and Film Daily rated the film in the "Ten Best" of the year.[14]

However, not all critics were as enthusiastic about the film; Graham Greene of the British Spectator called it a "huge inflated gas-blown object" and criticized its length, comparing it to the feat of a flagpole sitter.[8] A number of critics, although praising the film in general, felt that Myrna Loy, who appears rather late on in the film, gave a lackluster performance as Billie Burke.[10] Nugent said that "Miss Loy is a stately Bille Burke, and somewhat lacking, we fear, in Miss Burke's effervescence and gaiety", and Cecilia Agner thought she came across as "stilted, like her rigidly waxed and set blonde wig". Harrison Carroll] of the Los Angeles Herald-Express, however, sympathized with the difficulty of her role in portraying a prominent living actress, confessing that he was pleased that Loy did not attempt to imitate Burke's mannerisms.[47] Emily W. Leider believes that any of her character flaws were due to a "mushy" script, rather than her performance as an actress.[47]

Although the film is still viewed as a symbol of glamour and excess during the Golden Age of Hollywood, today the film has more of a mixed reception, with many critics believing that the film relies too heavily on its (now-dated) extravagance and is also too long; Christopher Null stated that The Great Ziegfeld is a "textbook case of how a film can lose its appeal over the years". Since its release the film has been criticized in particular for being unnecessarily lengthy and its overacting (particularly by Rainer), and is occasionally cited as a "prime example of the Academy's fallibility" in a year when other critically acclaimed pictures such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town were released, which some argue was more deserving of Best Picture.[47][48] Rotten Tomatoes reports a 64% approval rating based on 28 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.31/10. The site's consensus reads: "This biopic is undeniably stylish, but loses points for excessive length, an overreliance on clichés, and historical inaccuracies".[49] Emily W. Leider claims the film to be "more remarkable for its "legs and tinsel" extravagance than for its excellence."[8] David Parkinson of Empire gave the film 3 out of 5 stars and concluded that it "Drags in places and doesn't even try for a true-to-life portrait of the great theatre entrepreneur but it's shiny and big spectacle with impressive choreography."[50] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called it "amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice."[51] Emanuel Levy gave it a C grade and stated that it was "overlong and overblown but ultimately mediocre as a musical movie and as a biopic of the legendary showman."[52] James Berardinelli awarded it 2.5 out of 4 stars and stated that "although some of the production's technical aspects remain impressive, the dramatic elements come across as trite and many of the musical numbers are dated", but said that it was a "reasonably competent – albeit "airbrushed" – presentation of the main character's life."[53]

The seven Academy Award nominations were announced on February 7, 1937, and on March 4, 1937, The Great Ziegfeld won three Oscars at the 9th Academy Awards for 1936:[54][55]

Although he was not nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, Powell did receive the Screen Actor's Guild award for Best Actor in a tie with C. Aubrey Smith who was in Little Lord Fauntleroy. In addition, the Guild's Best Actress was given to Luise Rainer.[14]