ZIEGFELD GIRL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 135, 23 January 1942, Page 14

ZIEGFELD GIRL

(M.G.M.)

M R. METRO, Mr. Goldwyn, and Mr. Mayer, who glorified the Ziegfeld Girl ‘so adequately in The Great Ziegfeld,

might well have ieit it at that, instead of undertaking this new revelation of How Showgirls Make Good (or Bad). Or at least they could have omitted enough of the spectacular ensembles to have enabled mie to catch my last bus home. Anyway, a good many of those final ensembles were just repeats from a previous show, which indicates either that Hollywood is running out of money (it never runs out of girls) or that Messrs. M., G., and M. are running out of ideas. Missing my last bus and having to strap-hang in a tram may have made me unduly critical, but I am convinced that being long-winded is the greatest single fault of the M.G.M. studios-and if they can’t keep us critics interested during the last half-hour they must expect us to amuse ourselves looking for faults. Having had rather more than enough of feminine charms for one evening with the spectacular episodes in the first half of Ziegfeld Girl, I thereafter concentrated more on the psychological side: the effect of fame-and exposure-on the character of show girls, as exemplified by Sheila Regan (Lana Turner), Sandra

Kolter (Hedy LaMarr), and Susan Gallagher (Judy Garland). As the film is rather anxious to point out, it isn’t Mr. Ziegfeld’s fault that Sheila should go

wrong, spurn her matrimonially-inclined truck-driving boy-friend (James Stewart) in favour of a Park Avenue apartment (complete with Ian Hunter), and develop a taste for diamond bracelets and brandy. That would have happened anyway. Just as it also happens that Sandra and Susan remain Nice Girls, the one going. back to her violinist-husband, the other going up to top place in the electric lights outside the theatre. Throughout this extravagant display of Limbs, Love, and Life among the ladies of the chorus, Miss LaMarr has little to do except look lovely, and does that very successfully; Lana Turner goes into a moral decline with considerable dramatic skill; but Judy Garland never was and never will be a glamour girl, and should not, I think, have been required to make the attempt. The best job of all, however, was done by the man — it surely was a man-who wrote the bright dialogue.