The Great Ziegfeld: 1936
Well, that was a lot of movie. The ninth movie to win Best Picture was The Great Ziegfeld , starring William Powell as Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Luise Rainer as Anna Held, and Myrna Loy as Billie Burke. I say those names, but only because they are the three biggest names on the movie poster; in reality, the only lead of this film is in fact William Powell. William Powell was in, by my estimation, 98 percent of this movie, which happened to be just shy of three hours long. Was he nominated for an Oscar? Nope. Luise Rainer was nominated for Lead Actress and actually won, despite the fact that the character of Anna Held is one of the strangest characters I've ever seen. So, here's the plot, in a nutshell: there are these two guys, right? There's Jack Billings, played by Frank Morgan (famous for playing The Wizard of Oz), and there's Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., played by William Powell. In its essence, the story [looks like it] consists of Ziegfeld constantly competing with Billings...