Academy Award for Best Picture

1936

The Great Ziegfeld

Release dates

April 8, 1936

Starring

William Powell

Myrna Loy

Luise Rainer

The Great Ziegfeld is a 1936 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and produced by Hunt Stromberg. It stars William Powell as the theatrical impresario Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld, Jr., Luise Rainer as Anna Held, and Myrna Loy as Billie Burke.

The film, shot at MGM Studios in Culver City, California in the fall of 1935, is a fictionalized tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. and a cinematic adaption of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies, with highly elaborate costumes, dances and sets. Many of the performers of the theatrical Ziegfeld Follies were cast in the film as themselves, including Fanny Brice and Harriet Hoctor, and Billie Burke acted as a supervisor for the film. The "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" set alone was reported to have cost US$220,000 (US$3,738,945 in 2014 dollars), featuring a towering rotating volute of 70 ft (21 m) diameter with 175 spiral steps, weighing 100 tons. The music to the film was provided by Walter Donaldson, Irving Berlin, and lyricist Harold Adamson, with choreographed scenes. The extravagant costumes were designed by Adrian, taking some 250 tailors and seamstresses six months to prepare them using 50 pounds (23 kg) of silver sequins and 12 yards (11 m) of white ostrich plumes. Over a thousand people were employed in the production of the film, which required 16 reels of film after the cutting.

One of the biggest successes in film in the 1930s and the pride of MGM at the time, it was acclaimed as the greatest musical biography to be made in Hollywood and still remains a standard in musical film making. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture for producer Hunt Stromberg, Best Actress for Louise Rainer, and Best Dance Direction for Seymour Felix, and was nominated for four others. Although the film is still praised for its lavish production and as a symbol of glamour and excess during the Golden Age of Hollywood, today The Great Ziegfeld is generally seen less favorably and is considered by many critics to be excessively showy and long at just under three hours.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made two more "Ziegfeld" films - one entitled Ziegfeld Girl (1941), starring James Stewart, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner, which recycled some film from The Great Ziegfeld, and in 1946, Ziegfeld Follies by Vincente Minnelli. In 1951, they produced their Technicolor remake of Show Boat, which Ziegfeld had presented as a stage musical.