Home Entertainment : Reassembled ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ Arrives on Laser

The MGM/UA laser-disc release of “Ziegfeld Follies,” a 1946 MGM musical extravaganza designed to showcase the studio’s glorious stars, offers a state-of-the-art lesson in film preservation.

The all-CAV (full-feature standard play, $90) three-disc boxed set, produced by George Feltenstein and Allan Fisch, reveals not only their commitment to film history, but also is a signpost in how that history can be packaged when not all of the pieces are available.

The laser disc shows for the first time since early previews what the finished film was supposed to look like. The picture elements for all of the “Ziegfeld Follies” outtakes were probably destroyed in a studio vault explosion in the early 1950s. All that is left are the sound elements, which were stored in a different area of the studio, and most of these recordings survive. More than a dozen numbers cut from the original are presented on a separate audio analog channel, a tantalizing taste of the treasures that were lost.

The boxed set comes with some of the best detailed liner notes around, which make it possible to enjoy not only the preserved film, but also the deleted audio sequences. In addition, chapter searches pinpointing every number clearly indicate how to find them, including those available only on the audio analog track.

The original film, intended to celebrate the studio’s 20th anniversary, was budgeted at the then unheard-of cost of $3 million. Filming began in 1944 in an attempt to cash in on the successful franchise based on Florenz Ziegfeld’s spectacular Broadway stage shows. The 1936 biographical film, “The Great Ziegfeld,” starring William Powell, was a big success, with its rather hokey told-from-heaven opening borrowed here. “The Ziegfeld Follies” was designed to spotlight MGM’s stars, and various sequences were assigned to different directors eventually overseen by Vincente Minnelli.

But when previewed, “The Ziegfeld Follies” was a complete disaster. It was cut and re-cut and, after more than two years, finally was released in 1946, managing to make a profit even though its final cost had pushed it to $3.2 million.

Looking at it nearly half a century later, it has become a musical time capsule featuring some of the great dancers, singers and comedians of the time, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Bremer, Fanny Brice, Judy Garland, Esther Williams and Kathryn Grayson along with those on the rise: Lena Horne, Lucille Ball and Cyd Charisse.

Arrangements by the underrated Kay Thompson, who’s also heard on several tracks, are clever, and it is fun to see the lineage of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” in Arthur Freed and Roger Edens’ “Here’s to the Girls,” directed by George Sidney and featuring the beautiful young ballerina Charisse, and a lovely on-horseback beauty in Ball.

The glory of Technicolor is unmistakable; the laser discs were digitally mastered from a new interpositive that was manufactured from the original nitrate negatives. Two reels for which the original negative was lost (believed destroyed in a fire in the George Eastman House archives in the ‘70s) were reconstructed from safety-positive separations.

The sound, presented in stereo, was mixed from an early-generation, variable-density optical soundtrack. Microphonic “stems” used in the ‘40s, so mixers could create better-balanced monaural tracks, enabled digital remixing and editing for this release.

Another bonus is a copy of the script written for an anticipated Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney number, “I Love You More in Technicolor Than I Did in Black and White,” which was never recorded.

Other bonuses: a sequence from the documentary “When the Lion Roars,” with a discussion of the production of “Ziegfeld Follies” by William Tuttle and Charisse; the original theatrical trailer, and a variety of stills, including some from the deleted sequences lost forever.