MGM Turned Ziegfeld’s Broadway Excess Into a Movie-Palace Spectacle
Today’s Throwback Thursday belongs to 1936, when MGM decided that telling the life story of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. required three hours, towering sets, gowns for days and enough chorus-girl glamour to make subtlety file for unemployment. Robert Z. Leonard’s The Great Ziegfeld turned the Broadway showman’s rise, romances and spectacular stage revues into one of old Hollywood’s most unapologetically enormous musicals.
William Powell stars as Ziegfeld, with Luise Rainer as performer Anna Held and Myrna Loy as actress Billie Burke, Ziegfeld’s real-life second wife. The film also folds actual stage history into the fantasy: Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger and dancer Harriet Hoctor appear as themselves, all performers who had ties to Ziegfeld’s theatrical world.
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Old Hollywood Did Not Believe in Less
The Great Ziegfeld is nearly three hours of MGM-era spectacle, Broadway mythology, gowns, chorus lines and one production number determined to use every inch of the soundstage.
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The Real Ziegfeld Built an Empire Around Spectacle
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. became one of Broadway’s defining impresarios through the Ziegfeld Follies, lavish revues that mixed comedy, music, star performers, elaborate staging and the famously idealized “Ziegfeld Girl.” The movie is not a documentary version of that life — it is a polished, romanticized Hollywood treatment — but its obsession with scale makes perfect sense for a man whose name became shorthand for theatrical extravagance.
MGM had the resources to go completely feral with that idea. The film’s centerpiece, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” rises through an enormous revolving wedding-cake-like set packed with performers, costumes and visual excess. Choreographer Seymour Felix won the Academy Award for Dance Direction for the number.
Then the Oscars Made This Giant Musical Part of Film History
The Great Ziegfeld earned seven Academy Award nominations and won three at the 9th Academy Awards: Outstanding Production — the category now known as Best Picture — Best Actress for Luise Rainer, and Dance Direction for “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” It is widely recognized as the first biographical film to win Best Picture.
Rainer’s win also helped launch one of the earliest major Oscar streaks: she would win Best Actress again the following year for The Good Earth. But The Great Ziegfeld itself remains most fun when it stops pretending to be restrained biography and lets MGM do what MGM did best — build a fantasy so oversized that every staircase, gown and chorus line seems to arrive with its own orchestra swell.
Additional imagery accompanying INYIM’s look at MGM’s 1936 musical The Great Ziegfeld.
And yes, ninety years later the movie’s scale can feel almost comically excessive. That is precisely the point. This was prestige filmmaking before prestige learned to whisper — a biopic wearing feathers, satin and a very expensive staircase.
Watch INYIM Revisit 1936’s “The Great Ziegfeld”
INYIM’s Throwback Thursday edit revisits the glamour and spectacle of the 1936 MGM musical. Don’t have TikTok? Watch on IG.
Sources: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; AFI Catalog; Turner Classic Movies.
