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The Great Ziegfeld Reviews
The Great Ziegfeld fails to capture either spectacle or substance, dragging its feet with a clear lack of passion or love for the story it is telling.
A real curio of a film, it soars in spots and staggers in others.
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.
A nearly 3-hour film with big set pieces and over a thousand people employed, The Great Ziegfeld is far too long for a musical romp.
First place amongst those of its kind. [Full review in Spanish]
Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping three hours, but through some insane editing decision she's cut off in the middle of singing "My Man."
A work that dazzles, and is decidedly a smash hit wherever it goes. [Full review in Spanish]
Too glib for real life, it is persuasive for all that -- possibly just because of that.
For the greater part, The Great Ziegfeld is sentiment; for the remainder, spectacle. It is an unbeatable combination and MGM has seen fit to give it a more substantial claim in good casting.
Few films have been more lavish than this one... but since it can be doubted that Ziegfeld was either the Shakespeare or the Leonardo he is represented to have been, it can also be doubted that the money was well spent.
I think that three hours and five minutes is too long for any picture. The Great Ziegfeld suffers, too, from the fact that its most exciting sequence comes plumb in the middle.
There is no picture to equal it for lavishness, beauty, and all-around entertainment; and not once during the three hours that it runs does it become boresome.
The representation of this greatness is done with such consistent loud-pedalling that the picture lacks climax as much as it needs relief.
In comparison, no previous music dance spectacle, no matter how elaborately produced, approaches it from a standpoint of sheer brilliance and beauty.
It is brilliant and spectacular to a superlative degree with scenes that are nothing less than astonishing in their magnificence.
It is a great picturization of the career of an unforgettable figure in the American theater.
For sheer lavishness, attention to detail, honesty of purpose, The Great Ziegfeld is to be commended. Where the picture falls down -- hard! -- is in its fulsomeness.
Of course, it's swell to look at -- or swollen -- like a glorified goldfish; but then, if you examine it, its tail falls right off. One might perhaps keep it in a glass case -- which is more than you could do with this dead whale here.
Luise Rainer, the Viennese actress, is a risen star as Ziegfeld's first wife, Anna Held. Gay as a butterfly, temperamental as an April day, she is the outstanding actress in the film.
Though it is a flattering tribute to the taste of the late showman, The Great Ziegfeld is also an apt one, for it has the same combination of gaudiness and elegance, of show and finish, which you associate with a good "Follies."