The nominees for the 1937 Best Picture Oscar included some of the greatest movies ever made: Dodsworth, A Tale of Two Cities, The Story of Louis Pasteur, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Libeled Lady, San Francisco, and Romeo and Juliet (with Norma Schearer) were unequal but often good as well. And yet, the winner of that year's Best Picture award was The Great Ziegfeld, an undistinguished melodrama. Yes, in the middle, when they reproduce a Ziegfeld show, there are some impressive staged numbers, of which the best is definitely "A Pretty Girl is like a Melody," which just keeps building and building. But the rest of this movie is a long and undistinguished melodrama. How did it win the Oscar? And how, oh how, did Louise Rainer get the Oscar for Best Actress??? That I truly do not understand. Her very artificial performance pales into obscurity against some of the other nominees, like Irene Dunne in "Theodora Goes Wild," or Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfey" - or Ruth Chatterton in "Dodsworth." If you can catch the musical numbers and skip the rest, you'll get the uneven best this movie has to offer, and miss what is largely not worth bothering with.
Review of The Great Ziegfeld
