While not quite as insufferable as Broadway Melody 1929, the biopic The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar winner #9) is yet another movie about show business where we wander around following unlikable people. Namely, one person, Florenz Ziegfeld. This guy isn't even smarmy, he's just an asshole. He goes around lying and cheating everyone he knows, but always gets away with it because he's charming.
The movie is way too long to be enjoyable--over three hours. The overture alone (in which there's nothing on the screen but the word 'Overture') is probably more than five minutes long. The thing that probably clinches the Oscar for this one is all of the elaborately staged musical numbers, including the crown jewel of Ziegfeld's signature "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" with the huge spinning wedding-cake set piece. We keep taking time outs from the plot for these things; for someone used to modern Broadway shows where the songs move the plot forward or tell us about the characters, it feels like everything comes to grinding halt every time this happens.
The most interesting scenes in the movie are those with Frank Morgan as Jack Billings. He gets the best witty repartee. Morgan would go on a few years later to play the Wizard (plus various other small roles) in the Wizard of Oz. In an interesting coincidence, his future Oz costar Billie Burke, who plays Glinda the Good, was the real-life widow of Ziegfeld--and is portrayed in younger form by someone else (Myrna Loy) in this movie.
The women in this movie are either naive fools, sweet, biddable doormats, or both. There is the requisite early 20th century showbiz blackface act, though it's done in such a thoughtless kind of way that it seems like force of habit rather than actually trying to racially stereotype in a demeaning way. This doesn't excuse it, of course, but it's much less in-your-face Racism with a capitol R as the watermelon jokes in Cimarron.
Watched: July 15, 2017
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