Ziegfeld Follies

If a star-studded Hollywood cast from the 'Golden' years makes you enjoy a film, that alone will be enough to tide you over the nearly 2 hours of this musical bonanza. It seems nearly everyone is present.

True to the nature of the revue, there's no story and just a series of vignettes that come and go. Among them, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly have a dance show-off, your only chance to see one from this time. Esther Williams gives us a lovely underwater ballet, I would like to see more of her.

In spite of the scale of the production, the lavish sets and elaborate costumes, this is not, of course, aristocratic entertainment for those with a refined taste in music and dance but low brow frill aimed at the broad audience.

The revue was television of its time - an opportunity to shift among a few fluffy entertainments after a long day, nothing demanding our engagement beyond the few minutes of a skit. These days it seems to survive in SNL. The bits here alternate between broad comedy skits and song and dance numbers.

It's not bad, not particularly great either. It's not what I look for in a musical, and I will always opt for the fuller engagement of long narrative.

More interesting for me here are all the self-referential bits.

In the Astaire/Kelly show-off Fred, established musical royalty, plays a joke of pretending to not know who Kelly is.

Judy Garland enters her segment as herself, musing to a chorus of reporters about preferring song and dance roles rather than dramatic.

These people are here as themselves, the veneer of fiction is thin, opportunity for scenery and costume. You'll see some gorgeous examples of both, among the standouts for me being the all red ballroom in which Astaire swindles the rich countess and the dreamy finale, with chorus girls swirling through billows of bubbly foam. Briefly glimpsed among them is Cyd Charissee in her first appearance.

The whole is framed as Ziegfeld in heaven reminiscing about the shows he put on.

My favorite bit is the Chinatown skit with Astaire as a poor coolie dreaming about a woman he passes by on the street. His unrequited love becomes a dance they have together holding hand fans.

Let's give this movie credit for one thing: it doesn't claim to be anything other than what it is: an unconnected series of musical numbers and comedy sketches, meant to honor the late Florenz Ziegfeld. So, if that is what you want, terrific. If a particular scene bores you, you can fast-forward through it without missing anything.

The strength of the film was the wise decision to let Fred Astaire appear in more than one number. His dancing and on-screen personality are always delightful, because his joy in performing is obvious and catching. The highlight of the movie comes in the last performance, when he performs a wonderful tap-dance and singing number with Gene Kelly. They are so palpably having a good time that you almost forget how dreary so much of the rest of the film was!

The comedy sketches are absolutely the most miserable and un-funny things ever captured on celluloid. Painful, painful, painful. Good grief, do they drag on forever. Keenan Wynn performs an old Vaudeville sketch in which a man cannot get the operator to put his call through to a nearby number, while a parade of other characters have no problem putting calls through to the most obscure and distant locations on the planet. Potentially funny, yes? Well, yes, when Lou Costello did it two years earlier in "Who Done It" - that was the definitive version of the sketch. It is one of the funniest things Lou ever did. Why in the world would MGM have Wynn try to do the same sketch - he tries very hard to mimic Lou Costello's facial contortions and grunts and squeals of frustration - but it stinks.

And the "Pay him the two dollars" routine with Victor Booth and Edward Arnold - well, if this represents Vaudeville at its best, then I guess I don't regret not having been alive to see it after all. And Victor Hume takes a rare stab at comedy too; he appears to be trying to mimic Shemp Howard, and none too well at that.

The musical numbers in general are what you would expect from MGM - lavish, expensive-looking, and otherwise spectacular.

While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, I actually enjoyed the claymation at the beginning of the movie. One of the most bizarre and surreal scenes in any MGM movie ever has to be the 45 seconds of Eddie Cantor, in glorious claymation, and in blackface, for goodness sake, singing "If you knew Susie". It is hilarious, and the claymation really captures Cantor's performance style to a Tee - for comparison, I strongly suggest you watch "A Few Minutes with Eddie Cantor" (1923, in sound) on Youtube.

And speaking of classic Hollywood racial insensitivity, a long "drama in pantomime" features Fred Astaire and as a Chinese, stalking another white actress pretending to be Chinese. You really have to shake your head. And are Fred and Gene dancing in front of a statue of Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest? Perhaps not, but he sure looks Confederate....

Like I said, Ziegfeld Follies gives you get exactly what it claims to give you. But have the fast-forward ready.

The premise of this film is that Ziegfeld (with William Powell reprising his role) is in heaven thinking of his dream revue, with the rest of the movie just a playing out of that dream revue. I rather wonder about the direction, because this film managed to do what I've never seen done before - make William Powell appear hammy and amateurish in the opening moments as he plays Ziegfeld once again and then disappears for the rest of the film. Believe me, I say this as a huge fan of William Powell.

Thus there is no plot. It involves the big musical and comedy stars of MGM putting on a show of their various capabilities, and for all intents and purposes could be renamed "The Hollywood Revue of 1946" for those familiar with the original from 1929 which basically had the same purpose. Of course, technology has advanced considerably over the ensuing 17 years, but there are still some missteps. Basically, the musical numbers are good, but the comedy skits that punctuate them fall very flat and detract from the entire film. The highlight for me was seeing Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly perform together in a number. The musical numbers make this an above average film, but just barely.

It is most valuable because it shows MGM just as it begins to lose its grip as a leader in the film industry in the post-war era, and also because it reinforces what Buster Keaton always said - that MGM never "got" comedy.

If you get easily bored with those old movies that seem to roll and roll forever, this is for you. It really has no plot, but you really don't need one. You could call this movie the Grand Ball, because it really is a set of dances. (Except for a few comedy scenes) Overall, I strongly believe that it is a really good movie, especially in those Fred Astaire numbers (Here's to the Girls, This Heart of Mine, and the Limehouse Blues) This movie is a real MUST for classic movie and Ziegfeld lovers alike.

No doubt the jaded postmodern cynical viewer will find plenty to pick apart in this fluff (facile metaphysics, etc.). That is their loss.

This is not one of the great MGM musicals, but at its best it does what great musicals do: it sweeps you along in a kaleidoscope of color, movement and sound. And because of these qualities this trifle IS art as surely as Citizen Kane or La Promesse are. Cinema is not just an art of--or forum for-- philosophy; it is an art of the color palette, and with The Ziegfeld Follies the technical forces of a great studio created a sometimes exquisite canvas to behold. Unfortunately, like many old films, the canvas is fading.

I first saw this film 20 years ago projected from an exceptional 16 millimeter print that brought out the full richness of the Technicolor cinematography. None of the video versions I've seen since have come close. The same is true for the 1949 John Ford western, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which I saw many years ago in an unbelievably painterly 16mm Technicolor print. Prints of that film shown on the AMC network don't even come close to the richness of that print.

Its color alone is enough to make The Ziegfeld Follies visually entertaining for me, and that print I saw long ago convinces me that is one of the 10 or 20 most beautiful color films ever made. The merry go round scene (with Lucille Ball as I recall) in hot garish pink was particularly striking visually.

I contend that any film, even marginal or bad ones, made in the extinct and impossible to resurrect Technicolor process is worthy of seeing, because its very usage constitutes a lost art form in and of itself.

Like Ziegfeld Follies, middling films such as Kid Millions (1934), Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), Jesse James (1939), Down Argentine Way (1940), The Gang's All Here (1943) and The Captain from Castile (1947) are worth seeing almost exclusively because of their amazing color schemes.

The biggest crack about "Tech," as cine buffs call it, is that it was not "realistic" color. Bogus line of reasoning, as no cinematic color process can ever be realistic in the sense of replicating human sight. OK maybe Roger Deakins came close in "Sid and Nancy." Admiring Ziegfeld Follies solely for its color may not be enough for you, but it's enough for me in our era of dreary cinematic color.