The Ziegfeld Follies were a popular form of entertainment during the 1910s. They featured many types of entertainment from low-brow vaudeville humor to high class musical numbers featuring glorified women in elaborate costumes. This film is about the women who are privileged enough to be chosen to be a Follies girl and how their lives change when fame hits.
Lana Turner plays the lead, a beautiful elevator girl turned showgirl. Her performance is understated perfection from the beginning when she feels gorgeous and wonderful to her decline into alcohol and ill-health.
Jimmy Stewart plays her boyfriend, a sweet man who idealizes his relationship with Turner. When she begins to flake, his heart breaks, and he becomes a bootlegger with dreary hopes of striking it rich and feeling worthy of her.
Judy Garland is outstanding as a young, energetic hopeful trained in vaudeville. She is never annoying; her energy is cute and admirable. She had anxieties being cast with such beautiful women; she felt she would be ugly in comparison, but Garland is glamorous and attractive in her own right.
Hedy Lamarr is gorgeous as one of the most striking Follies girls. Her character joins because she and her husband are desperate for money since he is a struggling musician. Her role is smaller than the other women's, but her love for her husband is deeply moving.
Jackie Cooper has a small role as Turner's brother and Garland's love interest. His youthful innocence is a lot of fun, but his role is too small to have a real impact on the film.
The songs in this film are both beautiful and fun. "Laugh? I Thought I'd Split My Sides" features Garland and her father performing in a vaudeville show. The two are quite remarkable together; they are funny and well synchronized. "You Stepped Out of a Dream" is a softer melody which features the Follies girls "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" is sung both fast and slow, and both versions are great which is only testimony to Garland's amazing musical talents. "Minnie From Trinidad" is also a Garland song, a fun story song with many Busby Berkley visual effects. "You Never Looked So Beautiful" is the final song, a weak finale comprised of stock footage from The Great Ziegfeld, a 1936 film about Florenz Ziegfeld. The great thing about this film is that it is realistic. Instead of the actors randomly bursting into song to show their emotions, the songs are part of a Ziegfeld show. The only musical numbers are during practice or during the shows.
There are several nice extra features on this DVD including an introduction to the film, deleted song numbers, and an Our Gang short. The short film does not seem very fitting for the DVD except for the fact that it features dance numbers, specifically those representative of different eras through dance.
What a film!!!!!
"You stepped out of a dream" is one of the great songs from this outstanding motion picture. This number alone will give you chills and even if your a guy you would wonder what it would be like to decend on a glamor staircase. It the production number you don't want to have end. It is just beautiful. The whole entire film is also outstanding but the last scene before the final number in true Lana Turner fasion steals the film. In this scene she is fatally ill and leaves the theare while Tony Martin is singing "You stepped out of a dream." In her trade mark jestures at the top of the stair case without any dialog only music she thinks of being that beautiful Ziegfield girl again and decends down the stairs. The music builds and then she collapses. Oh,,,what a dramatic scene. This entire film will make your heart pound and only wish that Hollywood could produce something like this again.
Other reviews accurate--here's some extras
Unlike most other reviewed films, the reviews for this film are actually pretty accurate. The film details the rise of stardom of three Ziegfeld girls; Judy's character rises to stardom, Hedy's character retires to comfortable married life, while Lana's character "comes a cropper". The plot is overlong, and the Lamarr plot in particular is trite and uninteresting.
It's the numbers on one hand, and the Turner subplot on the other, that make this movie. The story of Lana's rise and fall from stardom is the only one that's worth viewing. This meaty role was the role that cinched Lana's stardom.
Moreover, the numbers are stellar. Some might say overproduced, but I say spectacular--most particularly, the "Out of a Dream" number has the most glamorous costumes ever glimpsed on celluloid. I've never seen so much feminine beauty in my life; beauty floating down ethereal stairs, to ethereal music sung by Tony Martin. You'll want to watch it again and again.
Here are a few bloopers to watch for:
1. In the "Minnie from Trinidad" number, shortly after the mule is seen, you can see a male dancer walking off the set,in the background--very much out of sync to the music. The first time I saw this, I couldn't believe the editor had missed it.
2. Watch Judy VERY closely as she waltzes down the stairs in the "Out of a Dream" number; you can see glimpses of nudity as she nears the bottom of the stairs!
3. In the "Out of a Dream" number, all the girls are smiling...except for Hedy Lamarr. This contrast is jarring. Hedy Lamarr's teeth were out-of-alignment in real life. She's one actress who was far more beautiful when not smiling.
"Say, he looks like an actor," says the platform conductor. And with that introduction, Gene Kelly steps off the train and into his film career. After starring on Broadway in Pal Joey, Kelly made his film debut in For Me and My Gal opposite Judy Garland, with the pair playing vaudeville performers who team up to find success and, of course, romance. But just when things are looking up, World War I intervenes, and Kelly has to take drastic measures to keep a promise and avoid the war, at least temporarily.
Bad move, Gene. Filmed in 1942, For Me and My Gal vigorously supports the war effort, including teaching Kelly the error of his ways. The old-time setting also allows for a basketful of nostalgic charmers, including "After You've Gone," "Oh You... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Judy Garland - George Murphy - Gene Kelly Director(s): Busby Berkeley DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) is devastated when his longtime dancing partner, Nadine Hale (Ann Miller), breaks up the team to set out on her own. Determined to prove that he can succeed without her, Astaire vows that he can pick any random chorus girl and make her a star. Fortunately for him, the chorus girl he picks happens to be one of the greatest entertainers of the 20th century, Judy Garland (playing Hannah Brown). Easter Parade turned out to be the first and only collaboration between the two screen legends. Garland made the 1948 film despite ongoing health problems then had to pull out of a planned follow-up, The Barkleys of Broadway (Ginger Rogers replaced her); Astaire had retired following Blue Skies in 1946 but was brought in for this film as an emergency... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Judy Garland - Fred Astaire Director(s): Charles Walters DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This is my favorite Judy Garland movie. The DVD is a faithful reproduction of the movie and has, as expected, a pictorial clarity unheard of in the movie era. The flawless reproduction is tarnished, however, in a scene near the end of the movie. In the scene, the lights are low and were corrected to present reality. They were rendered so dark that the stars, Van Johnson and Judy Garland, were nothing more than silhouettes on the screen. From the tape version of the movie, this scene was one of Judy's most hilarious scenes, attributed to the expressions she delivered in response to Mr. Johnson's advances, both of which were unseen in the black. The DVD is worth watching, but, for students of Judy Garland's talents, a tape version clarifies the omissions of the DVD. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Judy Garland - Van Johnson Director(s): Buster Keaton - Robert Z. Leonard DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Sometimes lively, sometimes pokey, this Technicolor MGM musical inspires mixed feelings in aficionados of the form--except on one point. No viewer will question why "On the Atchison, Topeka, & the Santa Fe" won the best song Oscar for 1946. This is a brilliant, inventive song given an epic staging. Director George Sidney pulls out all the stops for this wowser--even Marjorie Main sings, an eardrum-testing sound. The real-life Harvey Girls were waitresses imported to the far-flung Fred Harvey Hotels, civilizing oases along the railroad lines out west. The fictional Harvey Girls is set in Sandrock, where the traveling waitresses are joined by a sort of mail-order bride (Judy Garland) whose prospective husband is a bust--he's a roughhewn rancher played by Chill Wills. Garland... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Judy Garland - Ray Bolger Director(s): George Sidney (II) DVD Release Date: Released the 30 April 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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One of the finest American musicals, this 1944 film by Vincente Minnelli is an intentionally self-contained story set in 1903, in which a happy St. Louis family is shaken to their roots by the prospect of moving to New York, where the father has a better job pending. Judy Garland heads the cast in what amounts to a splendid, end-of-an-era story that nicely rhymes with the onset of the 20th century. The film is extraordinarily alive, the characters strong, and the musical numbers are so splendidly part of the storytelling that you don't feel the film has stopped for an interlude. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Director(s): Vincente Minnelli - Alan D. Courtney - Roy Mack DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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