The Great Ziegfeld (1936) |
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The Great Ziegfeld Cast |
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Movie Highlights |
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AwardsBest Writing, Original Story Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Film Editing Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Director Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Art Direction Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Picture Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Won) Best Dance Direction Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Won) Best Actress in a Leading Role Academy Awards [1937] (Won/Nominated: Won) Mussolini Cup Venice Film Festival [1936] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Plot SummaryIn MGM`s three-hour-plus The Great Ziegfeld, William Powell stars as the titular theatrical impresario, whose show business empire begins when he stage-manages a tour for legendary strongman Sandow (Nat Pendleton). With nary a penny in the bank, he c... TaglineThe Sensation of the Century! The Last Word In Entertainment! 10 Big Shows In 1 DiscographySinglesMarch of the Musketeers [1928] Ol` Man River [1927] A Pretty Girl Is ike a Melody [1919] It`s Been So Long Tulip Time Rio Rita Entry of the Gladiators Jingle Bells By the Beautiful Sea The Blue Danube Liebestraum No. 3 in A Flat Major Humoresque, Op. 101/7 La Marseillaise Tales from the Vienna Woods Sobre las olas (Over the Waves) The Washington Post Makin` Whoopee A Circus Must Be Differenet in a Ziegfeld Show Look For the Silver Lining My Man Queen Of The Jungle Yiddle On Your Fiddle You Never Looked So Beautiful You She`s a Follies Girl You Gotta Pull Strings Rhapsody in Blue Vesti La Giubba Un Bel Di Vedremo Shine On, Harvest Moon If You Knew Susie It`s Delightful to Be Married Won`t You Come and Play With Me |
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Full Cast and Crew |
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Actor CreditsNon Actor Credits |
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Photo Gallery |
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Fans |
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Trivia |
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Trivia and QuotesQuotes Fanny Brice: If I can give Belasco four dollars for silk stockings made of cotton, I can give Ziegfeld a little more for a mink coat made of skunk. Fanny Brice: Tell Mr Ziegfeld, I`m not in and if I was in, I wouldn`t see him and if I did see him, tell him, I wouldn`t buy a thing. Sampson: This is about talent.
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: Something good and cheap no doubt?
Sampson: Exactly! It`s a young girl named Brice... Fanny... Fanny Brice. She;s working in burlesque.
Gene Buck: Say, I`ve seen that girl, Flo!
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: Pretty?
Gene Buck: Well, yes and no. Shut your eyes and listen - yes! Open `em and look - no, but a great performer!
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: We shall have a look at her at once - tonight! Hotel doorman: Do you realize you gave me five pounds?
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: Yes, I`m trying to lose weight. Little Egypt: Oh, Jack, is Ziegfeld a friend of yours?
Jack Billings: Yes, we`ve been pals for years, but you wouldn`t like him.
Little Egypt: No?
Jack Billings: No, he`s up one day and down the next. If he got $10,000 tomorrow, he`d spend it on the girl he happened to like tomorrow night. You wouldn`t want to waste your time meeting a felloe like that.
Little Egypt: Oh, not if I met him on the right night. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: [after he has hired Jack Billings` valet away from him] Gentlemen never argue about gentlemen`s gentlemen. Anna Held: [on the phone with Ziegfeld after learning of his marriage to Billie Burke] Hello, Flo... Yes. Here`s Anna... I`m so happy for you today, I could not help calling you and congratulate you... Wonderful, Flo! Never better in my whole life!... I`m so excited about my new plans! I`m going to Paris... Yes, for a few weeks, and then I can get back, and then I`m doing a new show, and... Oh, it`s all so wonderful! I`m so happy!... Yes... And I hope you are happy, too... Yes?... Oh, I`m so glad for you, Flo... Sounds funny for ex-husband and ex-wife to tell how happy they are, oui?... Yes, Flo... Goodbye, Flo... Goodbye...
[She hangs up]
Anna Held: Darling...
[she falls to her bed, sobbing]
Marie: My poor, petite! If you love him so, why did you divorce him?
Anna Held: Because I thought it would bring him back to me. I was sure that it would bring him back to me.
[she cries] Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: [after catching Ray Bolger doing a little softshoe backstage] Buddy, you`re better with your feet than you are with your broom.
Ray Bolger: Mr. Ziegfeld, you think so? Gee, I wish you`d give me a chance. I`ve got talent, and I`d like to get away from shifting scenery and moving props.
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.: How long have you been a property boy?
Ray Bolger: Five years, but my heart hasn`t been in it.
Ray Bolger: You`ve been working a long time without your heart, buddy. Fanny Brice: Get me some viskey!Trivia Myrna Loy, who received second billing for this film, does not actually appear on screen until 2 hours and 15 minutes into the movie. A.A. Trimble, who portrays Will Rogers in the film, was actually a Cleveland map salesman who frequently impersonated Rogers at Rotarian lunches. Eugen Sandow is portrayed as a typically "dumb strongman". In real life, however, Sandow was highly intelligent and a superb businessman. Because he was among the first men to display his muscular body as a "work of art", he was considered to be the "Father of Bodybuilding" and this is what his gravestone reads today. Among his friends were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas A. Edison (who filmed him at the Black Maria Studios) and even King Edward VII. Sandow`s career became bigger than ever after his association with Ziegfeld. He became very wealthy and famous because of his mail-order businesses, gyms, souvenir photographs, books and personal appearances. There is a mountain in Alaska, a railroad and a small town in Texas (near Austin) named after him. Nat Pendleton was a former champion weightlifter and easily duplicates some of Eugen Sandow`s feats in this film; at the time, Nat was the only man to have ever played a strongman from this time period. In the footnotes of their American Film Institute`s Feature Films, 1931-1940, Catalog mistakenly lists Mary Lou, an adult, played by Jean Chatburn, and Sally Manners, a Ziegfeld star, played by Rosina Lawrence, as the same person. The first biopic to win and Academy Award for "Best Picture". Luise Rainer was the first actress in Academy history to win back-to-back Oscars for Best Actress, for this film in 1936 and The Good Earth (1937) in 1937. Katharine Hepburn repeated the trick in 1967/68. The set for "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" took months to build and cost over $200,000. This was substantially more than it cost the real Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. to produce a whole show. For her famous telephone conversation scene, which is generally credited as being what clinched the Oscar for her, Luise Rainer drew a lot of her material from a play by Jean Cocteau entitled "A Telephone Conversation". Luise Rainer had never heard of Anna Held when she got the part.
Billie Burke never really rated the film much despite taking a personal interest in the writing of the script. She went to great lengths to make sure that writer William Anthony McGuire never besmirched the good name of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., hence the playing down of his infidelities. The film`s costs were proving too much for Universal, so MGM bought the rights for $300,000 from them. Ultimately the film cost MGM about $2 million to make, a huge amount in its day. It did however go on to earn over $40 million. Billie Burke, the wife of the real Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., paid a visit to the film`s set one day. While there, she was photographed with Myrna Loy, who was portraying Ms. Burke in the film. Originally bought by Universal as a film in 1935. William Powell was to play Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Billie Burke was to play herself, and it would feature specialties by Fanny Brice, Judy Garland (and her sisters), Eddie Cantor and Ray Bolger. When Universal decided to make a faithful film version of another Ziegfeld production, the Kern-Hammerstein musical "Show Boat", in 1936, the studio heads sold "The Great Ziegfeld" to MGM. Only Powell, Brice and Bolger survived to the final picture. Ironically, MGM would buy the rights to "Show Boat" from Universal in 1942, and remake the musical, in Technicolor, in 1951. William Powell was loaned by MGM to Universal for the film, but Universal sold the film to MGM when costs mounted. Powell made My Man Godfrey (1936) for Universal instead. The sequence "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" was filmed in one continuous shot after several weeks of rehearsals and filming. It features 180 performers and cost $220,000; 4,300 yards of rayon silk were used for the curtains in the scene. | ||
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