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chezmax1936: The Great Ziegfeld
[Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia]
Another somewhat fictionalized autobiographical film, this is a musical (rather long &emdash; three hours) chronicling the life of Florenz Ziegfeld from his start exhibiting the strongman Sandow in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to his very successful runs of extravagant musicals, Ziegfeld Follies, and his veentual death in 1932, just a few short years before this movie was produced.
He is depicted as a talented producer, alternating between wealth and near-bankruptcy, and as quite a ladies man, and his relationships with Anna Held and Billie Burke.
The film itself is mostly a display of many of his famous musical productions, which are quite impressive for the time. As I was watching it, I was struck by how lavish and over-the-top these productions were, and how they've been parodied ever since. For example, there's a number closing out the first half of the film which shows a slowly rotating spiraling staircase, with men in top hats standing on the stairs, and dozens of dancing women, which I suppose is now a bit of a trope and object of parody, but this may have been where it started.
All in all, very glamorous, but I found it somewhat boring as the focus is not the plot, but the musical productions. The second half with the intrigue of his breakup with Anna Held and his subsequent relationship with Billie Burke, and the failure of his shows during the Great Depression and his death add some plot and excitement and help bring the movie together.
[Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia]
Another somewhat fictionalized autobiographical film, this is a musical (rather long &emdash; three hours) chronicling the life of Florenz Ziegfeld from his start exhibiting the strongman Sandow in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to his very successful runs of extravagant musicals, Ziegfeld Follies, and his veentual death in 1932, just a few short years before this movie was produced.
He is depicted as a talented producer, alternating between wealth and near-bankruptcy, and as quite a ladies man, and his relationships with Anna Held and Billie Burke.
The film itself is mostly a display of many of his famous musical productions, which are quite impressive for the time. As I was watching it, I was struck by how lavish and over-the-top these productions were, and how they've been parodied ever since. For example, there's a number closing out the first half of the film which shows a slowly rotating spiraling staircase, with men in top hats standing on the stairs, and dozens of dancing women, which I suppose is now a bit of a trope and object of parody, but this may have been where it started.
All in all, very glamorous, but I found it somewhat boring as the focus is not the plot, but the musical productions. The second half with the intrigue of his breakup with Anna Held and his subsequent relationship with Billie Burke, and the failure of his shows during the Great Depression and his death add some plot and excitement and help bring the movie together.