"Ziegfeld Follies" (1946)

Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was famous for his extravagant theater performances known as the “Ziegfeld Follies”. The Ziegfeld Follies rolled out the red carpet for every big name performer the producer could rope in for the show. They featured dancing, singing, comedy and everything in between. Ziegfeld Follies attempts to recapture the “let’s put on a show”-spectacle of the producer’s shows, touting itself on the DVD cover as the “Greatest Production Since the Birth of Motion Pictures”. It’s exactly the sort of hyper-overstatement you’d expect from something overflowing with this many top-billable performers, including Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, and Judy Garland. Though Ziegfeld Follies has certainly dated, it’s more for lack of cultural relevance than for lack of entertainment value. There’s an admirable go-for-broke quality to the film that creates a not entirely unexpected lack of consistency; some sketches or bits are still really fun, but others feel more like filler than well-thought out acts. It doesn’t help that some of these performances aren’t the most memorable work by the players that are doing them. Ziegfeld Follies is more of a cultural artifact of its time, a time capsule from when an excessive Broadway revue could easily draw in a crowd. 

Grade: B-