The Great Zeigfeld

THE GREAT ZIEGFELD DIRECTED BY ROBERT Z. LEONARD WARNER HOME VIDEO

THIS WAS THE Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1936. At three hours, there's a lot of extraneous spectacle under the guise of "entertainment value." And the canonization of Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, a philandering shyster (played stylishly by William Powell), is unacceptable. Clearly, it was MGM production chief Irving Thalberg's tribute to his sense of himself.

And yet there are pleasures. The famous Luise Rainer telephone scene is an understandable Oscar-grabber. She looks heavenward as her heart breaks, wishing ex-husband Ziegfeld good luck on his new show and new marriage. But even before that landmark moment of Hollywood histrionics, Rainer is strangely radiant and ethereal. (Isabelle Adjani is much like her in the current Bon Voyage.) Late-arriving Myrna Loy plays the new wife Billie Burke, and she is familiarly fetching; her popular rapport with Powell from their Thin Man series is undeniable.

Still, I was struck at how far back the Academy's history of honoring big-budget bores goes. Ziegfeld only came to life when Rainer was doing her strange thing and when the actual Fannie Brice (who didn't get her own bio-pic until the 1968 Funny Girl) brought in the obviously embarrassing element of American theater's ethnic basis. Brice's borscht- belt shtick was a lot like the loathsome Jackie Mason, and yet her femininity was not far from what Barbra Streisand eventually conveyed when impersonating her.

Altogether The Great Ziegfeld is an overbearing, sometimes nearly overwhelming, piece of kitsch. One of its three Oscars (for "Best Dance Direction") went to choreographer Seymour Felix for the 10-minute production number "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Ziegfeld's celebrated chorus line of dancers and models is arrayed on different levels of a huge, slowly-turning pedestal. It looks like an enormous wedding cake the size of the Woolworth building with the camera traveling along each layer, showcasing the showgirls, until it reaches the top—seemingly in one take. (Take that, Russian Ark!) On this evidence, Ziegfeld's idea of a great show—ostentatious pageants—reminded me of a local restaurant called El Teddy's that featured cabbage rose ceramic bowls in its foyer. Kitsch beyond your sanest dreams, and yet that is apparently all that some people want movies to be.

It's amazing to recall that The Great Ziegfeld was voted best picture over My Man Godfrey, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Dodsworth. It helps you to better understand the thinking behind the Academy's crowning of Chicago and Gladiator and Titanic several decades later. Bad taste (disguised as grand entertainment) is always with us.