Musical Watch: Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

Watched:  04/01/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Robert Z. Leonard, Busby Berkeley

Increasingly lost to time is the impact Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. had on American culture of the 20th century.  A showman, theatrical empresario, producer, promoter and more, Ziegfeld is most famous for his Ziegfeld Follies, a series of extravagant Broadway shows that ran from around 1907 to his death in the 1930's.  Much of what we thought of as a stage full of beautiful young women that flooded musicals in the 1930's and 1940's and gave Busby Berkeley (credited here) a career was Hollywood tinkering with the shows Ziegfeld had staged, based on French revues.   He managed to employ folks like Irving Berlin, WC Fields, Will Rogers and many, many more.

Had Ziegfeld not passed when he did, it's likely he would have expanded into Hollywood in a more serious manner (he was already there and died in Hollywood in 1932), bringing his sensibilities to the big screen.

He was credited with creating "The Glorification of the American Girl", both featuring and populating shows with large choruses of female performers.  But he featured acts of all kinds, and shows to this day are based within the Ziegfeld Follies (see the currently running Funny Girl).  He was also not afraid to push into the risque, and folks knew what they were getting.  You can find all sorts of interesting photos online looking for Ziegfeld girls.

In what is a star-studded flick - the movie follows three girls/ women who enter into the Follies.  Like the Schwab's Pharmacy story, Ziegfeld - never seen in this movie!  And treated a bit like that Wizard Judy Garland had previously tangled with - would pluck girls out of their mundane lives by finding them behind perfume counters, working in elevators, etc...   A bit of instant wish-fulfillment if you caught the right guy's eye (which is kind of a nightmare, but in an era in which women's career options were limited, and many Ziegfeld girls married well, it's not nothing).

Hedy Lamarr plays the wife of a struggling concert violinist who, because she looks like Hedy Lamarr, is offered a role as a chorus girl and then featured player.  Her husband can't take the shame that his wife will earn a living being looked at, and so leaves her.  Lana Turner (yeah, this movie does not skimp) plays a girl from Flatbush dating Jimmy Stewart when she is offered a role - and a shot at the wealthy men that come with it.  Judy Garland plays the daughter of a vaudeville performer who is recruited to the show, but has to leave her dad behind.  

Each girl follows a different path - and we're told in advance what those paths will be.  Someone will become a star, someone will leave for love and marriage, and someone will crash and burn.  

The movie is a melodrama, with each of the stars hitting the marks for the reason they were hired.  Garland is plucky AF.  Turner is beautiful and spirals terrifically.  Lamarr pines for her husband exquisitely.  

Stewart shows some of the edge people never want to ascribe to him, as if he's always Elwood Dowd in Harvey - but here he's so cheesed about Turner dumping him, he becomes a gangster.  Look for Jackie Cooper as Turner's brother.  And about 98 more players - the cast is gigantic between the lives of our three focal characters and then the staff of the show.

The movie is a mix of melodrama, some comedy and gigantic Busby Berkeley directed sequences that I cannot really sort out in some ways.  There is some kooky stuff in this movie.   Costumes that defy physics and common sense.  Gigantic turntables with tiers of performers.  Staircases to nowhere.  Just... a crazy amount of visual information.  And the famed Berkeley use of way too many women.  The numbers are spectacular.

In fact, this movie is kind of interesting in that the melodrama could have stood alone, and the musical numbers could have buoyed a mediocre movie.  But between the two, it makes for a solid and complete film.  

It's clearly hard to rec a pre-War Broadway-based period piece about the 1920's made in 1940 or 41, but if you're looking for what the studios were doing when they swung for the fences at this time - this is it.