The Great Ziegfeld **** (1936, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer) – Classic Movie Review 2026

Director Robert Z Leonard’s triple-Oscar-winning 1936 MGM musical biopic is an incredibly lavish, spectacular and profitable biography of the great Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, famous as the showman producer of the most extravagant stage revues of all time.

It won Oscars for Best Picture (awarded to the producer Hunt Stromberg), Best Actress for Luise Rainer and Best Dance Direction. At a vast budget of $2million, it cost even more than MGM’s 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty.

The story follows the ups and downs of Florenz Ziegfeld who starts out as a sideshow barker at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and goes on to stage ever bigger, ever more spectacular shows, sections of which are re-created in the movie, and in the process makes and loses several fortunes,.

William Powell memorably puts the flesh and blood on the hero, bringing warmth and understanding to the character of Ziegfeld, but it is Luise Rainer who won the Best Actress Oscar for her nimble performance as his French revue star first wife Anna Held. Myrna Loy plays second wife, the actress Billie Burke, Frank Morgan is his long-term buddy Jack Billing, while Fanny Brice and Ray Bolger play themselves.

If the cast and their performances are outstanding, the staging of the evergreen numbers is extraordinary, particularly for Irving Berlin’s ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody’ with its revolving giant wedding cake full of girls, and it was the choreography of this sequence that won dance director Seymour Felix his Oscar.

Also in the cast are Reginald Owen, Nat Pendleton, Virginia Bruce, Ernest Cossart, Robert Greig, Dennis Morgan, Leon Errol, Charles Trowbridge, Raymond Walburn, Jean Chatburn, Ann Pennington, Harriet Hector, Charles Judels, Marcelle Corday, Herman Bing, William Demarest, Clay Clement, Selmer Jackson, Charles Coleman, Bert Hanlon, Charles Fallon, Edwin Maxwell, Wallis Clark, Ray Brown and Pat Nixon.

Billie Burke, Frank Morgan and Ray Bolger are all memorably in The Wizard of Oz.

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The following year, director Sidney Franklin’s famous 1937 epic drama The Good Earth scored Luise Rainer her second Best Actress Oscar. Rainer triumphed as the first person to win back-to-back Academy Awards. She died on Tuesday 30 December 2014 of pneumonia at the grand old age of 104. Only four other actors have since match this feat.

Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Rainer ended her brief glorious Hollywood film career with Hostages in 1943 and then spent most of her life in England. She made the occasional film and TV appearances, including a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. Her last film role is the 1997 Fyodor Dostoyevsky adaptation The Gambler.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 2026

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