Plot Intro
The movie charts the ups and downs of the career of Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell), his wives Anna Held (Luise Rainer) and Billy Burke (Myrna Loy), and his legendary and magnificent stage shows, the Follies.
After a lengthy string of small-scale but rather asinine movies, it’s refreshing to have a Best Actress winner starring in a much more lavish affair, albeit one we’ve seen and reviewed on our previous project. My memories of The Great Ziegfeld are of a gaudy, expensive and generally spectacular film, but one that is overwritten, overplayed and running severely overtime at an unnecessary two and three-quarter hours.
Watching it again hasn’t changed my opinion much although I can see why, in an age when movie production was still quite primitive, an epic film documenting something as visually sensational as circus acts, dancers, big crowds, big costumes and Ziegfeld’s infamously extravagant shows was such a huge hit. Made on a (for the time) astronomical budget, it was also nominated for another five Oscars besides Best Picture and Best Actress.
And whilst it’s enthusiastically acted and constructed, the characterisation remains simplistic, and the plot a bit too pedestrian. Like the Follies themselves, it’s all show and not much substance.
It did, however, introduce the world to its leading lady and this week’s Best Actress winner, Luise Rainer. Rainer was born in Germany, and had only moved to Hollywood the year before nabbing the part of Ziegfeld’s real-life wife, Anna Held. The Great Ziegfeld was a much-anticipated release, and there was some speculation about her acting ability and whether she looked the part or not. But she enraptured audiences and gained international stardom pretty much overnight.
Her performance, like most of the movie, is immensely enthusiastic. She’s having a great time playing someone who changes from euphoria to fury at the drop of a hat, even if she is over-acting at times. I suppose this sort of lugubrious, mawkish style was popular at the time, but we’ve been commenting on the comparative subtlety of other Best Actress performances. Perhaps the enthusiasm for the movie and excitement about a new, fresh-faced star is what got her the award.
Rainer becomes the first of two actresses to win consecutive Best Actress awards, so we’ll be seeing her again next week for a much more controversial movie (prepare yourselves). Sadly, however, this led to her career downfall. After two years of immense success, Rainer found that audience expectations had become too high for her to meet them. On top of this, she tired of Hollywood socialite life; her mentor, the famous Irving Thalberg, died suddenly at the age of 37; and Rainer starred in a string of poorly received movies in the late 30s, leading to her being dubbed “Box Office Poison”.
She departed Hollywood in the late '30s, after less than a decade there. She dipped in and out of theatre, TV appearances and occasional dalliances in movies, but remained very much on the sidelines. She spent her final years living in Belgravia in a flat formerly owned by Vivien Leigh, and died not long ago in 2014 at the whopping age of 104 (in fact, five days before her 105th birthday).
I remember being relatively negative about Rainer on our previous project. I found her performance to be tediously overdone. In light of seeing other Best Actress winners from the time, I can look on her performance a lot more favourably. She’s a fascinating “flash in the pan” star of Old Hollywood, and a sad victim of the Oscars hype. Her life would make a decent biopic- Meryl Streep is available, isn’t she?
Highlight
The famous phone scene, in which Rainer congratulates her husband’s happiness despite being devastated that she will never be a part of it, remains quite effective.
Lowlight
The script is over-written. There are various dialogue scenes that go on too long and a quick cut could have made the film a more bearable length.
Mark
5/10
Doug says...
This is our first of two Luise Rainer films, in two consecutive Best Actress wins by her - a feat only matched by Katharine Hepburn. We’ve encountered this film before in our Best Film project, and neither of us were wildly impressed then.
Coming back to it, slightly older and not really wiser, I find myself looking on it with a kinder eye. The Great Ziegfeld would have made an excellent ninety minute film. The issue is that it’s three hours long.
The first hour is cracking - we get going, meet the devilish (but also quite dickheadish) Ziegfeld and see him from his very beginnings, as he tries to market a weightlifter to passing crowds. We meet the singer with whom he falls in love (Rainer) and things are moving at a great pace, with lots of energy.
It’s in the second hour that we meet our problem. For a solid hour and a half nothing happens. The thing is - and it’s understandable - director Robert Z Leonard is making a film about a huge showy spectacle - the Ziegfeld Follies - and wants to show us how grandiose and over the top it all was. So for ninety minutes (ninety minutes!) in the middle of this hugely expensive film, Leonard pauses the action and shows us musical number after number. He wheels in original members of the Follies (including none other than Fanny Bryce who is the subject of the musical Funny Girl for which Barbra Streisand would win her Oscar a few decades later). He throws ridiculous amounts of money at huge lavish sets, costumes, and more. It’s understandable, but ultimately it ruins the film.
Because we’re not in a hall watching a night of Follies entertainment. We’re here to see the story of Ziegfeld, and Leonard puts that on hold and then inevitably ends up rushing through the whole later part of his life. Within the last fifteen minutes, Ziegfeld marries his second wife, has four shows go live on Broadway, makes a fortune, bets everything on the stock market, loses everything in the Crash, goes senile and dies. It’s so fast that we actually found ourselves laughing as Leonard, having succumbed to his desire to showcase the Follies, suddenly realises he hasn’t got anywhere plotwise and has barely any time to wrap everything up.
Does Rainer deserve this Oscar? No. It is a wildly over the top performance, and even the phone call scene - which I loved on the original viewing - smacks of the ridiculous. She’s enthusiastic as hell, but even just a touch more subtlety would have lifted it. As it is, this is an overstuffed, gaudy film with performances to match. What sets it off perfectly for me, is the fact that Myrna Loy appears in the last twenty minutes of this three hour beast, and still demanded top billing on the posters. It’s the ridiculousness that this film deserves.
Highlight
The first hour focuses on the storytelling of Ziegfeld’s life and shines for it. It’s such a shame that this focus disappears.
Lowlight
The ninety minutes of Follies acts gets wearying after ten minutes. Bad call…
Marks
3/10
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