The Great Ziegfeld Blogathon – The Eddie Cantor Story (1953)

This is the first of 3 reviews for The Great Ziegfeld Blogathon being held this weekend over at Hollywood Genes.

Thanks for letting me take part Zoe!

–

“The stock market crashed. Everything is gone. Everything worked for, all of the sudden the bottom falls out of everything, down the drain. Just don’t understand it, all these years of work, now everything’s gone. ” – Eddie Cantor

Number of Times Seen – 1 (11 May 2020)

Brief Synopsis – Biopic of the life of Eddie Cantor, an orphan boy who became such a wondrous singing sensation.

My Take on it – When I heard about this blogathon, I knew very little about the Ziegfeld cast and story and chose three different aspects of things in order to learn more about the entire system.

My first choice was the biopic of Ziegfeld actor and singer Eddie Cantor.

The story is quite interesting and intriguing yet they never seem to find the right way to present things and it al comes across as being much too boring and banal for its own good.

The film has some great music which is fun to listen to and some of the on stage scenes are also presented in a nice way, yet overall something constantly feels missing here.

The characters aren’t developed well enough and it’s quite difficult to care about any of them or about what they do throughout the film.

The way that they tell this story is quite superficial and doesn’t go deep enough into things to help make it all much more impactful.

Due to the attempt to tell a story that spans such a long period of time, many of the scenes feel choppy and in some cases incomplete since much of the story seems rushed in order to find a way to keep the run time under two hours.

This is all quite unfortunate since it doesn’t really give us enough time in each of these scenes as things move along.

Bottom Line – Interesting idea that unfortunately is presented in a pretty banal and boring way.  The music is fun to listen to and some of the on stage scenes are presented in a nice way, but overall, this film doesn’t really give us much of a reason to really care about any of the characters.  The story is told in too much of a superficial fashion and the lack of character development really hurts things even more. The story is far too choppy and in an attempt to tell too much of a span of time over Cantor’s life, many of the scenes feel rushed and incomplete in order to keep the film under two hours which is a bit unfortunate.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – After attending the premiere of this film, Eddie Cantor said, “If that was my life, I didn’t live.” (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy (5/10)

_______________________________________

Check out my *updated* movie stats here

To see my reviews of Oscar Winning Performances check out this link

To see my reviews of all Oscar Best Picture Winners click here (now complete)

Here is a link to my movie index A-Z