This movie is a great mystery. It has a less-than-compelling plot, tiresome dialogue and an excruciatingly slow pace, which makes its three-hour running time seem twice as long. Yet it was a big hit in 1936 and won the Academy Award for best picture.
What did audiences of the time like about this sprawling cavalcade of mediocrity? Nostalgia for a passing tradition of show business must have played a part. The movie charts the rise of Florenz Ziegfeld from midway showman to Broadway king, the inventor of a kind of glitzy, super-sized variety show that represented the apotheosis of vaudeville. Vaudeville had pretty much died out by 1936, given the coup de grace by talking pictures, and people must have missed it already -- realized that something precious from their youth had vanished from the American scene.
Arthur Freed, when he started his producing career at MGM a few years after The Great Ziegfeld, mined this mood of nostalgia often in the musicals he made for the studio.
The Great Ziegfeld also has some stunning cinematic passages in which it "recreates" numbers from Ziegfeld's shows. These involve bizarre moving sets of great size and intricacy, often filmed in long, elegant tracking shots from swooping cranes. They don't have much emotional impact, since they don't have much to do with the drama, and they lack the deranged energy and inventiveness of Busby Berkeley's big production numbers, but they're still amazing feats of filmmaking.
The best moments of the film are those few in which Fanny Brice does a brief cameo turn. She was really something -- kind of like a female Jerry Lewis with sharper timing and a sweeter temperament -- and it's a shame she never found movie vehicles that could better showcase her appealing comic persona.
Add it all up and you have the formula for a box-office and critical success in 1936. Today, the film is little more than a curiosity -- a record of popular appetites that would be fed by greater artists in the years to come, when the Freed Unit at MGM kicked into high gear.