Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

Lana Turner, Judy Garland, and Hedy Lamarr star in this showgirl ’sploitation flick that tries to cash in on the glamor and drama of The Great Ziegfeld (it actually recycles footage from that film’s dazzling musical numbers), but ends up a chintzy lurid and poorly-written propaganda piece about what happens to women who dare to abandon their paternalistic yoke and enter showbiz.

The whole plot (or should we just call it the moral) is spelled out 20 minutes into the film in an opening night speech: “…You’re Ziegfeld Girls… Some of you will end up with your name in lights (close up on Judy Garland). Some of you will end up with a husband and kids (close up on Hedy Lamarr). And some of you are going to end up…, well, not so good…. But don’t blame it on the Follies…” Some peptalk!

Despite an all star cast, the film fails to hit glamor velocity. The costumes by Adrian are stolen from a highschool pagent with fake birds, butterflies, and stars sticking out in all directions with wires, and an uninspired montage of showgirls on stair-parts evokes nothing of Ziegfeld’s creatively evolving stages. But Lana Turner as golddigging Sheila has a few campy moments climbing into a bubble bath wearing her jewelry, and spends the whole movie drinking herself to the bottom. She gets slapped by a gangster in a speakeasy, anachronistically wearing a private eye disguise. If she’d been a little older Turner might have played it up more for comedy and we’d have a hilarious gem like The Dolly Sisters. She eventually dies of old movie disease, a mysterious wasting condition that robs her of any ambition and reunites her with her forgiving deadbeat boyfriend Jimmy Stuart while keeping her hair and face perfect.

Hedy Lamarr is decorative and not much else, but that’s what you expect from a showgirl. Her infantile deadbeat husband is an out of work musician…. Which reminds me of a joke: What does a stripper do with her asshole while she’s working? (Answer: Drop him off at band practice! Haw!) Meanwhile, 17 year old Judy Garland plays her usual starry-eyed kid with the big voice. She gets one good number Minnie from Trinidad with choreography by Busby Berkeley, but otherwise stays virginal and financially supports her overbearing bombastic father — sort of a vaudeville era Hillary Duff. Eve Arden shows up from time to time as a wisecracking Eve Arden-type, and Tony Martin is handsome but nearly invisible as the Follies’ crooner.

Florenz Ziegfeld certainly didn’t have to go out “discovering” pretty girls since they lined up for an opportunity on his casting couch, but in this film Ziegfeld doesn’t even appear. Instead he’s represented by the sexually ambiguous Edward Everette Horton, who comes off as a sort of creepy pimp with lines like “Mr Ziegfeld is only interested in your daughter!” Ignore this schmaltz and watch the real Ziegfeld in Glorifying the American Girl instead.