The Crimson Moviegoer

"The Great Ziegfeld" is the pack in mad magnificence and a great show. M.G.M. determined to memorialize the famous producer in his own lavish style, and the lavishly lushly extravagant sets must have set them back over a million dollars. The movie is a musical review, a biography, and a history of Broadway wound on one reel.

Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. opens his movie career barking for Sandow at Chicago's World's Fair in 1883, and dies broke on Broadway amid souvenirs of his, the finest shows of the era. His life crosses Little Egypt, Klaw and Erlanger, Stanford White, Harry K. Thaw, Lillian Russell, and started on their way such stars as Fannie Brice, Anna Held, Jerome Kern, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Billie Burke, Harriet Hoctor, Ray Bolger, and the glorified American girl. Revolutionizing the New York stage he began by copying foreign revues and built successively his follies, his shows on the roof garden of the New Amsterdam and produced the top in musical comedies like "Show Boat," and the "Three Musketeers." Ziegfeld cracked the whip over Broadways thirty dizziest years, and his death after the crash ended a great period in entertainment.

William Powell plays expertly the vibrant and extravagant Ziegfeld, but Louise Rainer walks off with the show, heavy and expensive as it is. As Anna Held her charm and appeal make Myrna Loy and the most glamorous chorus M.G.M. could collect seem drab. The beautiful, tempestuous little French singer is alternately sunny and gay and llystericat but her line as she watches her beloved husband, Ziegfeld, kiss a drunken chorine, is a real heart breaker--"You might at least have closed the door." Loy is competent as Billie Burke and Frank Morgan is at top form in playing Ziegfeld's friendly rival.