The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Decided to start watching all of the Oscar best picture winners, in order. I hadn’t heard of some of these movies, some I love and have seen multiple times already and I actively hate others, planning to never watch them again. Fair warning, there will be spoilers in these and other reviews to help explain my point of view.
Wow, OK. Even though this movie was over THREE HOURS LONG I don’t think it focused on the right things and once again, don’t think it deserved to win Best Picture. The “best” thing about it is the staging of the Follies shows. Those were quite grand and makes me sad that this is a black and white movie because those scenes would have been amazing in color. However, there were too many of them and towards the end, I fast-forwarded through them to get to the true meat of the story. Sadly, there isn’t much there though.
Ziegfeld was ambitious and he cheated on his wife and….that is all this movie told us about him. There is no insight into WHY he was so ambitious or WHY women threw themselves at him. We could infer that the latter was because he was charming and in later years, because he could help them with their career, but the two women he married weren’t overly ambitious themselves and seemed content to be a housewife, ending their careers, so his power wasn’t necessarily the draw for them. Then there was the young girl Ziegfeld knew when she was a child (not clear on the relationship she had with him and his father, but seemed as if she was his father’s student…maybe). When she showed up in his office as an adult, I thought their relationship would be explored more, but it was just dropped.
Overall, this is a movie about the shows Ziegfeld put on and that’s it. There was no insight into him as a person or into the influence he or his shows had on the industry. This was just a studio flexing, dropping all of their big stars into a movie that wasn’t about the title person, them or much of anything else. 2.5 out of 5 stars.
