Ziegfeld Follies

It’s July, 2021. If any decisions have been made as to what will be the fate of The Warner Archive Collection, the news hasn’t yet reached these ears. The WAC is still releasing terrific Blu-rays each month, but that release schedule may be running on auto-pilot, from plans and arrangements organized six months ago.

We certainly can’t complain about the present flow of WAC product, especially if one is a fan of musicals. Astonishingly good digital restorations have reached deep into the MGM library, knocking off favorites in sensational HD color and sharpness, showing detail never before seen on home video. Just since last September CineSavant has reviewed stunning WAC discs of The Opposite Sex, The Pirate, Good News, Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun, Broadway Melody of 1940, and the non-musical but killer-Technicolor The Yearling.

There’s also a new string of Warners Doris Day features that now look far better than they ever have before, starting with Romance on the High Seas. The finishing achievment are long-awaited discs of The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, great Warner Bros. musicals finally untangled from legal ownership issues.

Ziegfeld Follies arrived at the end of 1945, when the experts say that the MGM musical was at the apex of its popularity. The confident super-production celebrates grandiose excess for its own sake. The gala presentation is ostensibly dedicated to the legacy of the great Broadway showman previously honored in MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld. But it’s really a valentine from MGM to itself, honoring its “All the Stars There Are in Heaven” mantra while plugging the seemingly endless musical talent pool available to the reigning king of musicals, Arthur Freed.

The movie is a revue patterned on Florenz Ziegfeld’s plot-less variety formula: music, comedy and spectacle. It begins like a film blanc, with a pompous trip through a starry afterlive. The view cruises by heavenly temples dedicated to Shakespeare and P.T. Barnum, and finally settles on one monument with the name Ziegfeld. Only MGM would assert that big-time showmen receive VIP treatment in Heaven, and only MGM would place those particular three entertainers in the same pantheon. There we find an angelic Flo Ziegfeld (William Powell) in a sentimental mood, drinking champagne. (←).  The real message here is “We’ve got it all.”

Ziegfeld Follies was actually filmed in 1943, and tinkered with for two years. The movie was apparently initially previewed at a staggering 172 minutes. Even at just under two hours (with an added orchestral overture) it sags heavily in the middle. A true revue in the Ziegfeld tradition is a difficult thing to pull off — it’s the kind of show that needs to start big, grow with each unrelated act or segment and finish with the biggest topper of all.

Vincente Minnelli is the supervising director. The whole show is suffused with his lush art direction ideas as well as subtle technical achievements that may go unnoticed. The complicated visual and color effects in some scenes must have been the result of endless testing.

The show has plenty of good material. Each ‘act’ is announced with title card as might be done on a vaudeville stage. The Technicolor lensing is dazzling and probably sufficient in itself to impress many viewers, along with the endless main title procession of star names. In the end, the non-narrative format is what keeps Ziegfeld Follies from aging well. Without a story to follow we lurch from one skit or song to the next. The enterprise becomes tiresome a lot sooner than it should.

At least a third of Ziegfeld Follies is terrific, keeper material. Fred Astaire’s Limehouse Blues is a dance retelling of Broken Blossoms in Chinatown that reaches for artsy tragedy and succeeds. (wide shot near top ↑)   Several of the big numbers in other parts of this show sport grandiose stage constructions that often suggest High Kitsch. The Limehouse ballet takes place in a surreal purple and green landscape that creates a fateful mood for the broken-hearted Tai Long’s romantic dream of Moy Ling (Lucille Bremer, bottom photo ↓).

↑  Almost as good is Judy Garland’s musical number, Interview with the great star. Garland is as impressive as ever but the number seems overworked and hyper, trying too hard to yield its few jokes. As stagecraft blocking and dance work it’s slick and precise, nothing to sneeze at. Garland saves the last master shot take by sheer pro willpower: when a lock of her hair keeps falling into her face, she must flip her head several times to get it back. When she finally repositions the hair manually her move is almost invisible — while singing to playback and keeping in step with the intense choreography.

→  Lena Horne sings Love, a torch song given a more elaborate presentation than usual. She leans against a wall or two to sing, and the moving camera seems in synch with the song’s emotions. The ‘tropical’ color design is also beautifully modulated for Lena’s skin tones … she looks terrific, not merely exotic.

Astaire’s other number with Lucille Bremer is a Raffles-like skit with visuals that remind us of his Let’s Face the Music and Dance in an earlier RKO picture. It starts off well with a monocled Astaire doing some good pantomime as an opportunistic jewel thief whose criminal mission is sidetracked by Bremer’s Princess. For this reviewer the number breaks down in an ostentatious and rather ugly set, a construction of moving floors and women leaning against trees that look like white deer antlers. After all the build-up, the resolution of the number’s internal story isn’t very satisfactory either.

Somewhere in the middle range are Ziegfeld Follies’ big stage extravaganzas. The movie opens with a long number called “Here’s to the Beautiful Girls,” a complex pageant involving dozens of troublesome elements — moving cameras, platforms, prancing women and horses — that must have been a huge headache to coordinate. Several long takes blend Astaire’s introductory song, a meat parade of leggy models, and finally an imperious Lucille Ball as an impossibly tall pink lady cracking the whip on a dozen creeping cat girls. (↑)  It’s elegant and technically refined, even if the whole thing is wildly overdone, almost garish. Like most of the ‘big show’ art direction in these revue shows, it’s also artistically inert … even the bizarre cat menagerie doesn’t evoke much except surprise.

The same thing goes for the ending, a similar pageant broken up by some smoothly-filmed ballet choreography featuring huge floating mounds of soap bubbles. Cyd Charisse does her best to gazelle through these things without breaking her neck. They somehow keep the bubbles from sticking to her, sparing us the sight of the beautiful Cyd reduced to a soapy Michelin Man. For a few moments we’re entranced by the sheer crazy colors of the globs of bubbles. It’s as if the dancers are trapped in an oversized, psychedelic lava lamp. But the finale comes off as empty and impersonal, a feeling not helped by trilling singer Kathryn Grayson, who has the personality of a cherubic porcelain doll.

These technically sophisticated numbers are all show and little art. Ziegfeld Follies ultimately works overtime to justify Louis B. Mayer’s idea that he was king of the entertainment world, and to prove to other studios that Leo the Lion has the biggest toy box in town. The Esther Williams water ballet is likewise just an empty showcase; what Williams’ ever-smiling face is supposed to communicate has always eluded this reviewer. It’s curious that the Archers team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger should be able to out-wow these visual numbers with (relatively) limited resources available in their English studios – little more than colored lights and cut-out cloth scenery. Even though the Archers could be pretentious (The Tales of Hoffmann) they were always artistically ambitious and had something to say, as in The Red Shoes. They even carried over a musical-operatic aesthetic in their non-musical dramas, like the expressive Black Narcissus.

Some of the other numbers now have dated terribly, or seem to be nostalgic remnants of ideas that may have felt forced in 1946. It’s not often that we get to see Fanny Brice on film; MGM had already ruined her appearance in The Great Ziegfeld by chopping off the whole second half of her signature song My Man. Here she seems a grotesque clown that would only be understood by the people who remembered her on stage. Anyone born later than 1946 will need an explanation for her importance and individuality, as she certainly is nothing like Barbra Streisand.

The legit La Traviata opera scene reeks of the Mayer concept of culture; it doesn’t belong in this stack even if some sources say that Ziegfeld did include such artsy material from time to time. And especially not next to the comic sketches starring Brice, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold and Victor Moore, and finally Red Skelton. None now seems particularly funny, although Skelton’s fans are going to love his over-the-top clowning.

That leaves the ‘historic’ pairing of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to ponder. While wondering what the title The Babbitt and the Bromide refers to, we get a congenial rivalry, or a spoof of a rivalry, that’s not a whole lot of fun. The two extraordinarily talented dancers kick each other and pull off other tricks, which only encourages the thought that because the real men in the same field are often compared, they don’t like each other. The number seems to be the result of an edict to put them together, as P.T. Barnum would combine star headliners to create a bigger glow. It doesn’t happen: the number’s overall effect is mild and underwhelming.

Hume Cronyn, William Frawley, Peter Lawford, Grady Sutton and Ray Teal either have noted parts or can be spotted along the way; I’ve never noticed favorite Carol Haney, but she’s said to be in there somewhere.

Ziegfeld Follies is a musical favorite for many but it’s a tough sell to new audiences. It’s almost better to sample the acts one at a time, skipping ahead (Heresy!) when individual segments wear out their welcome.