Years later, a considerable number of original Johnston printed and autographed photographic prints and many original negatives were purchased at several auctions by at least four different American collectors. Cast & Crew Read More William Wyler Director Barbra Streisand Fanny Brice Omar Sharif Nick Arnstein Kay Medford Rose Brice Anne Francis Georgia James Walter Pidgeon Florenz Ziegfeld Photos & Videos Katharine Hepburn repeated the trick in 1967/68. As a result, the audience is never certain of the fate of the character, because the film jumps to the Judy Garland finale. Luise Rainer was the first actress in Academy history to win back-to-back Oscars for Best Actress, for this film in 1936 and The Good Earth (1937) in 1937. He became very wealthy and famous because of his mail-order businesses, gyms, souvenir photographs, books, and personal appearances. While Judy Garland rerecorded for Decca the wistful standard, "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" (music by Joseph McCarthy, lyrics by Harry Carroll), the star made no commercial version of the lively rumba written for her by Roger Edens, a ditty turned into a mammoth Busby Berkeley production number, "Minnie From Trinidad." For more information on Funny Girl, visit the Concord Theatricals website. For the sake of continuity, Judy Garland is costumed and made up to resemble Virginia Bruce, who crowned the "Wedding Cake" set in the earlier film. Sandow's career became bigger than ever after his association with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.. Judy, Hedy, and Lana are gorgeous, but even their legendary beauty can't save this. The music was written by Al Shean. The "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" set alone was reported to have cost US$220,000 (US$4,053,381 in 2019 dollars[5]),[6] featuring a towering rotating volute of 70 ft (21 m) diameter with 175 spiral steps, weighing 100 tons. The beautiful costume sketches shown in the opening scenes are uncredited, but may have been done by the talented Adrian or his staff. Vincente Minnelli received credit as Scenic Designer of the stage show, plus additional credit as Costume Designer for two numbers written by Vernon Duke (music) and Ira Gershwin (lyrics): "Island in the West Indies", sung by Gertrude Niesen and danced by Josephine Baker; and "Sentimental Weather", sung and danced by June Preisser, her sister Cherry Preisser, and Duke McHale. This rather than For Me And My Gal (1942) might be his first film. Beneath towering, glittering, feathered headdresses, the Ziegfeld Girls floated . The film was directed by Robert Z. Leonard and featured musical numbers by Busby Berkeley. Kathryn Grayson's final B-Flat on "There's Beauty Everywhere" had to be re-dubbed. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) Trivia Showing all 51 items A.A. Trimble, who portrays Will Rogers in the film, was actually a Cleveland map salesman who frequently impersonated Rogers at Rotarian lunches. got an MGM contract. Cast Characters Crew View More Desktop | Mobile MGM gave this film a two-week roadshow test run at a famed legitimate showplace, the Colonial Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning August 13, 1945. A huge treasure trove of extremely artistic full-nude and semi-nude full-figure studio photos with all the glass-plate negatives were found stored at a farm near Oxford, Connecticut, where he had lived since the 1940's. Most were showgirls from the Ziegfeld Follies, plus a great storehouse of both aspiring and known actors and actresses. They became a radio programin 1932 and 1936 as The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air. Content on this page is contributed by editors who belong to our editorial community. Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli, Howard Dietz, William F. Rodgers, Joseph Vogel, and MGM east coast sales manager E.K. A musical number sung by Garland, "We Must Have Music", was deleted from the final film. Gene Kelly is allegedly in the Judy Garland "Trinidad" sequence. During his career he ended up photographing several hundred actresses and showgirls, a few of who eventually became famous in the movies. Doris Eaton Travis became the last surviving Ziegfeld Girl after the death of Dorothy Raphaelson in 2005. Adrian is credited with designing the gowns in this film. The show mixed performances by new and established acts-an incredible list of talent that included Will Rogers, Bob Hope, W. C. Fields, Josephine Baker, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice (the original Funny Girl), and Sophie Tucker.These acts were interspersed with musical numbers and tableaux vivant . Judy Garland, Hedy Lamar and Lana Turner--three of the most glamorous leading ladies of the Golden Age of Hollywood--star with Jimmy Stewart as young women, each chosen for a life of fame on stage as a Ziegfeld Girl. Ziegfeld Follies (1945) Trivia Showing all 40 items At the beginning of the "Bring On The Beautiful Girls" number, several older women are shown; these are women who actually appeared in the original Ziegfeld Follies on stage. Powell made My Man Godfrey (1936) for Universal instead. Sandra and Franz rush to her side as Susan, now a star, sings from the stage. When MGM made The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, a soft biopic of Florenz Ziegfeld that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Myrna Loy was cast to play Ziegfeld's former wife Billie Burke. Original director George Sidney quit after one month of filming and was replaced by Vincente Minnelli. Despite its mass publication as one of the featured songs, "It's Been So Long" is never performed in the film. The film was announced as a Universal production in January, 1934 with Lowell Sherman directing. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. When Life magazine showed a photo of Silver in his pink feathers and bows with the headline 'Silver is a Sissy', the horse's trainer threatened to sue MGM for defamation of Silver's character. However, after negative reaction from preview audiences, MGM decided to cut the actual moment of death before the film's official release. Maybe I'm being a little too hard on this, maybe not, but in my humble opinion this movie is strictly for fans of Judy, Lana, Hedy, Jimmy and M-G-M. By what name was Ziegfeld Girl (1941) officially released in India in English? - Ziegfeld Girls; Walter Brennan; Adolph Menjou, Greer Garson (panel) (May 12, 1957), Dorothy W. Raphaelson, A Ziegfeld Girl, Dies at 100, Doris E. Travis, Last of the Ziegfeld Girls, Dies at 106, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ziegfeld_girl&oldid=1130124832, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 28 December 2022, at 18:22. For the sake of continuity, Judy Garland is costumed and made up to resemble Virginia Bruce, who crowned the "Wedding Cake" set in the earlier film. At the time, Nat was the only man to have ever played a strongman from this time period. Jimmy Walters: Soon as I saw you, I said to myself, that's a hot lookin' little number. Unfortunately, the town no longer exists per the Texas Historical Society--the Alcoa Aluminum factory near Rockdale is named after the town, as it sits where the town once was. Trivia fact: One of the Ziegfeld girls in the film was played by Patricia Ryan, the future Pat Nixon. - Comedy sketch: "Death and Taxes," directed by Vincente Minnelli, performed by Jimmy Durante, Kay Williams, Stephen McNally, and Edward Arnold. In 1960, Alfred Cheney Johnston donated a set of 245 large prints of his work to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a voluptuous figure. The movie's Dance Director, Robert Alton, had choreographed the 1936 Broadway "Follies". James Stewart and Felix Bressart costarred in The Shop Around The Corner (1940). Like her character, Judy came in with her father (Frank Gumm) as her accompanist and was flopping until Roger Edens, like Slayton (Paul Kelly) in the film, took over the audition, coached her to sing more softly and subtly, and got her the MGM contract. Discovery by Flo Ziegfeld changes a girl's life but not necessarily for the better, as three beautiful women find out when they join the spectacle on Broadway: Susan, the singer who must leave behind her ageing vaudevillian father; vulnerable Sheila, the working girl pursued both by a millionaire and by her loyal boyfriend from Flatbush; and the First, Ziegfeld moved her to the Follies of 1925, where she became the inseparable companion (and rumored lover) of the formidably intellectual Louise Brooks, a featured dancer in the Follies and on the brink of Hollywood stardom. The sequence "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" was filmed in two lengthy takes after several weeks of rehearsals and filming (a definite cut is made when moving to a close-up on the singer dressed as Pagliacci, presumably to effect a change of camera position, necessary to start the inexorable move up the huge staircase). And almost exclusively Tungsten or natural lighting too. After she turns down Gil's marriage proposal, he joins a bootlegging gang and ends up in prison. - "I've Got Those Rooney/Pidgeon/Skelton Blues" with Garland, Ball, and Greer Garson (in a number they'd concocted on a war bond train) moaning about their frequent co-stars. - A "Fairy Tale" sketch with Katharine Hepburn, Margaret O'Brien, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie 'Butch' Jenkins. Unlike that film and the later Ziegfeld Follies, Ziegfeld himself does not appear as a character.[2]. The on-air sketch, entitled "Bungling Burglars", had been broadcast on January 4, 1940 and featured Fanny as the precocious Snooks, with Hanley Stafford playing her exasperated Daddy. She also posed for artists like James Montgomery Flagg and Alfred Cheney Johnston. Planned in 1938 to be made with Eleanor Powell, Joan Crawford, Virginia Bruce and Walter Pidgeon. After the songwriters demonstrated this change-of-pace routine at the home of the actress, her mother opined, "Well, I don't think so." Susan, a seventeen-year-old from a theatrical family, is discovered performing a vaudeville act with her aging father. Your email address will not be published. During the 1920s, three New York girls pursue careers performing in the iconic Ziegfeld Follies. We welcome your contributions so please create an account if you would like to collaborate with other editor's in helping to shape this website. They are: - Musical number: "We Will Meet Again in Honolulu" (music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed), directed by Merrill Pye, sung by James Melton, audio available on Rhino's CD and Warner Home Video's DVD. Her only other movie, A Night at the Opera (1935) also features an extended sequence set at one of Verdi's operas (Il Trovatore). Other Ziegfeld stars, Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers are portrayed by actors in the film. Included among the American Film Institute's 2004 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 America's Greatest Music in the Movies for the song "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody. Both films were produced by MGM. The machine producing the bubbles for the finale was responsible for one of the greatest filming fiascoes in movie history. For her famous telephone conversation scene, which is generally credited as being what clinched the Oscar for her, Luise Rainer drew a lot of her material from a play by Jean Cocteau entitled "The Human Voice". But she was considered too old to cast by the studio. When producer Florenz Ziegfeld put together a small group of showgirls for a lighthearted summer show in 1907, nobody could have imagined the giant Broadway hit and lavish revue it would become. A second test run began at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 28, 1945. This rather than For Me And My Gal (1942) might be his first film. Only a fragment survives, as it was used in the MGM short A New Romance of Celluloid: We Must Have Music (1942). At around 1:22:28 (during the "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" number), you can see a stage hand with a cue card in the reflection of the second showgirl's mirror guitar. Kiki Roberts, the lover of American gangster "Legs Diamond", was also a Ziegfeld girl. However, the earlier Pre-Code film Glorifying the American Girl (1929) contains an accurate depiction of Ziegfeld's productions and was partly filmed in 2-strip Technicolor. The MGM revue marked Brice's last film. To this day, the British are referred to as "Limeys" by North Americans because of their use of the lime juice. Sandra, a European beauty, is spotted and recruited while accompanying her violin virtuoso husband Franz to his audition for the show's orchestra. Oscars were never made of "solid gold". The family fled to France in 1881. - A tap dance number for Eleanor Powell. A revue with no connecting theme, which left him free to devise separate numbers according to his fancy and all, despite their diversity (except the three he didn't direct), held together by unity of style, an elegance, and sophistication that are his own. At this time, color broadcasting was in its infancy, limited to only a small number of high rated programs, primarily on NBC and NBC affiliated stations, so these film showings were all still in B&W. Ultimately the film cost MGM about $2 million to make, a huge amount in its day. Examples of this shade would now sell for around $4000. -"(We're Having a) Heat Wave" with Ethel Waters reprising the number she introduced the Broadway musical "As Thousands Cheer" - "Pass That Peace Pipe" (music and lyrics by Martin, Blane and Roger Edens) with Garland, Rooney, Ball, Walker, George Murphy, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, Gene Kelly, and Charles Walters (The song was later given to Joan McCracken by Walters when he directed Good News (1947).) - "Sand", a sketch with Garland and Astaire in blackface. The story is just plain bad, worse than most Metro fluff. The fourth of 14 films pairing William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the opening scenes with Shiela Regan (Lana Turner) as the elevator operator, she is describing to a friend her meeting Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. on her elevator. Cast & Crew Read More Robert Z. Leonard Director James Stewart Gilbert Young Judy Garland Susan Gallagher Hedy Lamarr Sandra Kolter Lana Turner Sheila Regan Tony Martin Frank Merton Photos & Videos View All Myrna Darby was one of the iconic Ziegfeld Girls of the 1920s. . Afterwards, teams of workers used large rackets to keep them under control, but the gas from the bubbles remained a constant hazard, and between each take Minnelli would order the soundstage's doors open so the cast and crew could breathe. Among others,known and unknown. Marion Bell performs a song from the Giuseppe Verdi opera La Traviata. Long Island was filled with duck farms. Ironically, MGM would buy the rights to "Show Boat" from Universal in 1942 and remake the musical, in Technicolor, in 1951 (Show Boat (1951)). Only Powell, Brice, and Bolger survived to the final picture. Nat Pendleton was a former champion weightlifter and easily duplicated some of Eugen Sandow's feats in this film. The gown designed by MGM resident designer Helen Rose, who privately designed Grace Kelly's wedding gown when she married His Royal Highness Prince Rainier of Monaco, worn by Lucille Bremer in "This Heart Of Mine" is owned by actress Arlene Fontaine. She was saved when Maxine Cantway and Sheila Browning helped extinguish the flames. The theater that Ziegfeld built in 1927 on 6th Avenue and 54th (with financial help from Hearst) was used as a cinema from the 1930s and demolished in 1966 after a brief reopening. He would return to the silver screen five years later in the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946). All the shots in that book are airbrushed in the pubic area, to keep them legal with respect to the publishing standards of the day. ". Ed Gallagher died is 1929 and is played here by Charles Winninger, but Al Shean portrays himself. The leaded glass lamp shade that was used as set dressing for the home of Lana Turner's parents is a 15-inch "owl" shade, produced by the Duffner and Kimberly company (likely sometime between 1905-1913). Three women are plucked from obscurity to become Ziegfeld Girls. Myrna Darby. Ziegfeld ended up losing the bulk of his money in the stock market crash of 1929, and he died in 1932. The stage show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre and ran from January 30 through May 9, 1936, plus a return engagement between September 14 and December 19, 1936. But it was this affiliation that elevated him to being able to start photographing everything from aspiring actresses and society matrons to a wide range of upscale retail commercial products for magazine ads. As a result, the audience is never certain of the fate of the character, because the film jumps to the Judy Garland finale. Fears also lived out a show business myth: the chorus girl going on for the star. 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