Cinema: The New Pictures: Apr. 20, 1936

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The second half of the picture exhibits in euphemistic style the collapse of Producer Ziegfeld's romance with Anna Held, his meeting with Billie Burke (Myrna Loy), Christmas Day among the home-loving Ziegfelds, including small Patricia and her dolls. Enraged as his stars go off to Hollywood, Ziegfeld goes into a slump. He recoups again, puts four simultaneous hits on Broadway, mortgages their receipts to play the market. When Producer Ziegfeld died in 1932, he was heavily in debt.* In this particular, the picture is historically trustworthy. Its hero is shown expiring in elegant penury, an orchid in one hand, repeating to the Great Stage Director his favorite professional motto: "I must have more steps."

The Great Ziegfeld was in production two years. It lasts three hours, cost $2,000,000 and includes the most ornate sets of its kind ever built. It was written by William Anthony McGuire, author of five shows for Ziegfeld, and directed with monumental opulence by Robert Z. Leonard. In addition to three cinema stars, its cast includes three genuine Ziegfeld celebrities (Fanny Brice, Harriet Hoctor, Ray Bolger) and accurate counterfeits of two others: Buddy Doyle as Eddie Cantor and A. A. Trimble as the late Will Rogers. Trimble is a Cleveland map salesman who, often mistaken for Rogers, was last sum mer discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts. The picture will be shown in 20 U. S. cities as a "road show" attraction before being displayed at lower prices in ordinary cinemansions.

All this, adequately advertised in pre release ballyhoo which was grimly improved when the picture's Manhattan premiere last week coincided with the death of Marilyn Miller, onetime Ziegfeld star, comes under the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer routine. Its result is more surprising. At once biography and able extravaganza, The Great Ziegfeld approximates, more closely than any show he ever produced himself, the Ziegfeldian ideal. Pretentious, packed with hokum and as richly sentimental as an Irving Ber lin lyric, it is, as such, top-notch entertainment.

A Message to García (Twentieth Century-Fox). Impressed with the resources of U. S. history as a mine of cinema material, Producer Darryl Zanuck has so far worked it for such nuggets as The Bowery, The Mighty Barmim and The Prisoner of Shark Island. A Message to García is more ore from the same vein, showing that 1898 courier, Lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan, performing the errand which the late Elbert Hubbard publicized in his famed essay. Dispatched by President McKinley to give Cuban General Calixto García a verbal message to the effect that the U. S. was on his side in his revolt against Spain and to discover the strength of the rival armies, Rowan did so after a harrowing foot journey through the Cuban jungle.