The Great Ziegfeld Details

This sumptuously mounted MGM musical biography of Broadway's most flamboyant showman is perhaps slightly too long for today's tastes, but it thrilled cinema-goers at the time and won the best film Oscar. Luise Rainer also won the first of two successive Academy Awards as best actress for her performance here as Ziegfeld's wife, Anna Held (she won the following year for The Good Earth), and her famous telephone scene is a lesson in screen acting. Suave William Powell is the Great Flo, and he reprised the role eight years later in Ziegfeld Follies. A real treat — just catch those girls descending that staircase to A Pretty Girl Is like a Melody.

Mammoth biopic which despite a few show-stopping numbers never takes off dramatically and becomes something of an endurance test; interesting, however, as a spectacular of its time.