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 by stealing Billings's ideas but making them bigger and grander. That device is how most of the major plot points make their way into the story: Billings's carnival attraction draws more interest than Ziegfeld's at the Chicago World's Fair, so Ziegfeld enhances his World's Strongest Man attraction and ultimately makes more money. Billings travels to Europe to sign a famous French actress, Anna Held (played by Luise Rainer), to a contract; Ziegfeld hears of Billings's plans and beats Billings to their meeting, hiring her from right under his nose and subsequently marrying her. Billings brings a date (Billie Burke, played by Myrna Loy) to a costume ball right after Ziegfeld's divorce from Anna; even before Billings can have a single dance with her, Ziegfeld steals her away, woos her, and goes on to marry her. Billings has a show on Broadway? Ziegfeld puts two shows on Broadway. And so on and so on. At the end of the movie, Billings visits a failed, broke, and dying Ziegfeld and offers an olive branch; he offers to pay off the debts Ziegfeld accrued while mounting four Broadway flops. Ziegfeld kindly accepts the offer, but admits that he knows that Billings's money is gone just like his. Flo looks back on a montage of his life's greatest hits (and flops), and passes away in his chair.

What I liked:

This will be a common thread for the rest of the post, so buckle up, but I loved the sequences that took place on-stage. It's clear that most of the film's budget went into the thirty-five minute Ziegfeld Follies sequence, as well as the several other live performance sequences that take place throughout the film. 

I liked the artful subtlety of the importance Ziegfeld Sr. had in Ziegfeld Jr.'s life. This whole time, we as an audience believe that Flo is doing all these things and going above and beyond in order to beat Billings and have the upper hand, but if we think back to the singular scene Flo has with his father in the beginning, then we'd know that he is living his entire life for his father's approval. Powell made Validation a masterful Superobjective*. If he just wanted to win, but didn't at the end, then our hearts would be broken. But he wanted his father to be proud of him, and his failure at the end of his life had a different weight because of how hard he was trying- not to win, but to gain approval. Validation as a superobjective makes the highs higher and the failures much more gut-wrenching. 

*So, superobjectives. My acting teacher taught us that there are five basic human needs that drive all of us in some way or another. Our characters have a want in a scene: I want to woo her, I want to extract the truth, I want to leave. But in the character's inner life, there are overarching life wants, and the five big ones are Love, Validation, Happiness/Joy, to Win, and Survival.

What I didn't like:

There was a creepy bit with Ziegfeld Sr.'s incredibly young piano student towards the beginning; it was cute until she came back towards the middle of the movie all grown up. Then it got weird.

Luise Rainer's performance as Anna Held was so incredibly strange. I don't know if she was written that way or if she made those choices herself, but although I found truth in her circumstances I did not find truth in her acting whatsoever.

This movie. Was so. Long.

What surprised me:

This movie came out so soon after the real Ziegfeld passed away that there were some people in the true story that were able to play themselves. Fannie Brice (as in Funny Girl Fanny Brice) played herself, and Ray Bolger (also coincidentally in The Wizard of Oz as the Scarecrow) played himself as well. There were more people from Ziegfeld's life who were still alive but they either opted not to play themselves for personal reasons or were unable to due to contracts with other studios. I had to do research into why certain people played themselves and certain people didn't, and it kind of bothered me that it wasn't consistent; either everyone should have played themselves or nobody should have, in my opinion.

It's endlessly disappointing to me that William Powell didn't win an Oscar for his work in this film; he wasn't even nominated. He was in most of the film, and if he wasn't in a scene at the beginning, he wasn't absent for long. Not only that, but what he had to say about his experience playing this role and what he learned by embodying a real person was inspirational and beautiful: "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." It's so cool to me to see how humbled an actor can be simply by stepping into another person's shoes and learning something they weren't expecting to learn. I definitely want to learn more about William Powell and the way he worked.

Why it won Best Picture:

Spectacle. Full stop. There is no other element that could have won this film Best Picture. The budget must have been absolutely astronomical. The Ziegfeld Follies sequence was thirty five minutes long. THAT REVOLVING CORKSCREW STAIRCASE. I'm attaching a link to the scene. You've just got to watch it.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ick8

Final thoughts:

I'm discovering that the less I like a movie, the harder it is to write about it. I watched The Great Ziegfeld in May, and it is now more than halfway through June as I'm putting this post up. I didn't think there was anything particularly special about the movie except for (and I promise this is the last time I'll say it) the theatrical sequences. The acting was fine; the story, though intriguing, didn't really hold my attention; there really is only one reason this film won Best Picture. I'll attach the staircase scene again for good measure. Watch it. I mean it.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ick8

And, while you're at it, here's Ray Bolger, pre-Scarecrow days, absolutely CRUSHING a tap number in The Ziegfeld Follies sequence depicted in The Great Ziegfeld.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hpiaPG2yZk&t=47s

My Current Ranking:

1. Mutiny on the Bounty

2. Grand Hotel

3. Wings

4. All Quiet on the Western Front

5. It Happened One Night

6. The Broadway Melody

7. Cavalcade

8. The Great Ziegfeld

9. Cimarron

Film number ten is The Life of Emile Zola!