The Great Ziegfeld

The 1936 Best Picture Oscar winner is surely an extravaganza of stage splendor, and William Powell charms as the impresario who knew the highest of highs and lowest of lows.

Merry Christmas! What better way to celebrate the season than looking back on some old movies? And if we’re talking classic cinema, how about another Oscar winner?

“The Great Ziegfeld” is the penultimate essay in my ongoing quest to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture. I’ll say right from the start this was not one of my favorites encountered during the project. The early Golden Age musicals tended to rely on the songs all on their own, along with not a little spectacle, to entertain audiences.

I prefer musical numbers carry the story forward, and in “Ziegfeld” they very much do not.

Based on the life of stage impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., the movie is a hair over three hours long and I’d estimate that at least one-third of that is just depictions of his shows. Sometimes entire songs are shown — in some cases performed by the real stars Ziegfeld promoted, like Fannie Brice — while others are montages blending pieces from several shows such as “Show Boat.” There’s one section where William Powell, who plays Ziegfeld, disappears entirely for at least 30 minutes as we watch song-and-dance numbers.

The movie makes no apologies for these long musical departures, and indeed wallowing in the sheer spectacle of them was no doubt intended to be the film’s primary appeal. Director Robert Z. Leonard and screenwriter William Anthony McGuire — both of whom received Oscar nominations — seem content to let the movie coast on a heaping helping of the ol’ razzle-dazzle.

But this is perhaps what Ziegfeld himself would’ve wanted. As portrayed by Powell — who did not get a nod from the Academy, which surely must’ve stung — Ziegfeld has a titanic ego but a genuine love for huge shows that wow the audience with their extravagant production values.

The “Ziegfeld Follies” that he produced in numerous iterations were essentially story-free revues filled with songs and comedy, headlined by the famous “Ziegfeld Girls” set-pieces, where dozens of ladies pranced and paraded in ostentatious costumes, climbing up and down a veritable ziggurat of stairs he had constructed for them.

The movie makes Ziegfeld’s constant demands of his stage hands to build ever more and higher stairs a running joke — basically, his Rosebud.

I will say there is one sequence near the center of the movie, marking the launch of the first Follies, that is pretty spectacular. The camera roves along what appears to be a winding staircase, each portion featuring various Ziegfeld Girls (and a few guys) dancing and cavorting in exotic settings and locales. As the music shifts with each scene, we follow the action up this minaret, the stage curtains rising a little bit at a time to reveal the next piece, the whole thing spinning slowly as we go. During one portion, the steps each become the long ends of pianos.

It’s like watching a whole historical tableau unwinding itself before our eyes. The fact this was done with the cameras and sound recording equipment of the time makes it a truly astonishing technical triumph, if nothing else.

(The cost to build this set alone was reputedly $220,000, or nearly $5 million in today’s dollars.)

The story begins with Ziegfeld, known by Flo or Ziggy to his friends, working as a carnival barker at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. His featured act is Sandow (Nat Pendleton) the strongman. He finds his audiences continually lured away by his lifelong rival Jack Billings (Frank Morgan), who flaunts scantily clad women, until Ziggy learns to hype Sandow’s sex appeal by having him wriggle his muscles rhythmically for the ladies.

His first big “get” for his stage productions is luring French singing sensation Anna Held, signing her out from under the nose of Billings — another repeating occurence in the story. Interestingly, despite their rivalry Ziegfeld and Billings seem to retain a genuine affection for each other.

Played by Luise Rainer, Anna eventually becomes Ziegfeld’s wife as the two share a rather strange and not entirely healthy relationship. She accepts his lavish gifts, orchids and diamond necklaces and bracelets, as tokens of his devotion, but then threatens to have her serving lady pack her bags to return to Paris at the slightest perceived transgression.

The marriage eventually ends, due in no small part to Anna’s jealousy over Ziggy spending lots of his time and money on his other stars, chiefly Audrey Dane (Virginia Bruce), an ambitious blonde. Anna is a rather tragic figure, talented but full of anxiety and self-doubt, and Rainer won the Best Actress Oscar for her work.

Later Ziegfeld meets Billie Burke (Myrna Loy) and tries to woo her the same way, but she’s made of sturdier stuff — and also comes to appreciate him for the man he is rather than the things he can give her.

Eventually things come crashing down as Ziegfeld’s shows start to lay eggs, and then the great stock market crash of 1929 threatens to put him under permanently. Another of the idiosyncrasies of Ziggy the movie dotes upon is his complete lack of fiscal prudence. He never spends on himself, always using whatever money he has to lure new talent or create even more ornate costumes — even if he has to put off his creditors to do it.

As a showman, the movie depicts him as more than a little bit con man too, pioneering the philosophy that even bad news is better than no news. For instance, Ziegfeld will sometimes not pay people just so they’ll sue him, and he can land on the front pages of the tabloids again. He’ll use the receipts from his new show to pay off his debts from the last show — always striving for that next, big hit.

Powell, best known for the “Thin Man” series, where he also played opposite Myrna Loy, portrays Ziegfeld as a well-meaning scoundrel, not a blackhearted guy per se, but certainly one adept at charming and manipulating others. Always dressed nattily, one of the few times his confidence seems to flag coincides with forgetting his tie at the barbershop. Seeing Powell’s bare Adam’s apple seems almost shocking.

I liked a lot of things about “The Great Ziegfeld,” though in many ways it’s two different movies glommed on to each other. There’s the human story of the man behind the glitz, and then showcasing the glitz itself. While the musical numbers can be dazzling, they go on way too long and detract from the depiction of Ziegfeld, the person.

The thing about being dazzling, of course, is that it leaves you a little blinded.