Marilyn Miller was NOT the star of this film. Marilyn Miller was a beautiful TALL, leggy showgirl who was Broadway's brightest star of the 20s. She was in "Sally", "Sunny" - she also filmed them in 1929 and 1930.

The star of "Glorifying the American Girl" was Mary Eaton. Mary Eaton was picked by Ziegfeld in the 20s to be the successor to Marilyn Miller (because Miss Miller was getting uppity.) She replaced Miss Miller in "Kid Boots" with Eddie Cantor.

Mary Eaton, in my opinion, couldn't hold a candle to Marilyn Miller. I think Mary Eaton was showcased far better in "The Cocoanuts" (1929).

I loved this film because this is my era - I feel so at home watching musicals and movies from the late 20s, early 30s - the songs are so catchy.

I loved the start as it showed girls from all over America walking to Broadway and instantly went into Mary Eaton singing "No Foolin'". I also liked Olive Shea - I was glad when she got her "Buddy" -she seemed quite a natural actress. I didn't particularly like Mary Eaton - she didn't seem very starry eyed - she came across as tough and jaded.

Helen Morgan's song I loved but I also thought Eddie Cantor's skit went on far too long.

While the Ziegfeld Follies is GLORIFYING THE American GIRL, one young lady sacrifices love for success.

This antique musical, produced under the personal supervision of Florenz Ziegfeld for Paramount Studios, is another backstage melodrama (a very popular genre at the time) about finding happiness through fame and success on the stage. Like so many other pictures of the era, it revels in Talk & Music; unfortunately, the sound quality is generally poor, making much of the dialogue & lyrics rather hard to decipher.

The representation of Ziegfeld's lavish production numbers is interesting in a historical context, and would be more pleasing to the eye if the original Technicolor footage still survived. Celebrated dancer Ted Shawn was responsible for the ballet numbers, while Irving Berlin supplied some of the music. A careful attention to the soundtrack will disclose the use of old standard tunes in the soundtrack: "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody," "Bye, Bye, Blackbird," "Side By Side" & "Blue Skies."

The regular cast is made up of long-forgotten performers who still give the material their best efforts: Mary Eaton plays the dancer looking for fame in the Follies; Dan Healy is her rapacious but talented partner. Edward Crandall is Miss Eaton's doe-eyed department store boyfriend; Olive Shea plays the salesgirl who loves him desperately. Sarah Edwards has a few good moments as Miss Eaton's crocodilian mother.

Ziegfeld brought in three big stars to liven things up during the movie's final lap. Regrettably, Rudy Vallee's rendition of his hit "Vagabond Lover" is both wooden & unintelligible. Perched on a piano, Helen Morgan is equally difficult to understand, but her personality still comes through in her rendition of a torch song. Hyperactive Eddie Cantor comes off best of all during a boisterous sketch about a Jewish haberdasher.

Available – entirely in black-and-white alas! – on an otherwise excellent Grapevine DVD. A hybrid if ever there was one, "Glorifying the American Girl" both scales the heights and plumbs the depths. It's a crying shame the talented Millard Webb wasn't allowed to direct the whole film. The long-awaited Ziegfeld revue scenes are ghastly. Perhaps Technicolor may have rescued them from utter banality or at least turned them into an agreeable curiosity, but they are positively painful to watch in black-and-white. Mind you, nothing could save the long-winded Eddie Cantor talk-fest which must rate as one of the direst "humorous" routines ever filmed. It's a shame audiences are sent away with such a poor impression of a movie that holds the attention admirably until the very moment the camera expectantly enters the theatre for the oft-trumpeted Ziegfeld first night. Here we are treated to a procession of ancient newsreel clips, which Norman Brokenshire ineptly tries to tie together. This proves, alas, to be a foretaste of the horrors to come.

Let's forget about Ziegfeld and Harkrider and hark back to the opening of the film where Mary Eaton holds us spellbound with her (beautifully recorded too) department store song, "No Foolin' ". Here we are cleverly and deftly introduced to four of the five main characters. Crandall is a bit of a dud, but the other players (who will soon by joined by the talented Dan Healy) give the performances of their lives. Real-life Ziegfeld star Mary Eaton is wonderful, but she's not outshone by the charming Gloria Shea. What happens to Gloria provides one of the most dramatic moments in the whole history of the cinema, followed by a dramatic "chase" sequence through New York streets that will have even viewers in a 2015 audience on the edges of their seats.