Grand Hotel

Rating

Director

Edmund Goulding

Screenplay

William Drake (Play: Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum)

Length

112 min.

Starring

Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt, Robert McWade, Purnell Pratt, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Rafaela Ottiano, Morgan Wallace, Tully Marshall, Frank Conroy, Murray Kinnell, Edwin Maxwell

MPAA Rating

N/A

Review

When it was elected Best Picture of the year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it seta unique record that stands to this day. It is the only film ever to receive no other nominations and still triumph for the ultimate prize. Grand Hotel is an all-star romp that became a huge success for MGM and still plays well today.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the company that had “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven”, created the first ever ensemble cast featuring five of their biggest stars: Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Wallace Beery. If made today, it would be laughed out of the Cineplex but in the 1930s, the film carried a great deal prestige and made a mint at the boxoffice.

The story revolves around Baron Felix von Geigern (JohnBarrymore) who has been forced to resort to petty thievery to repay his gambling debts. He stumbles into a love affair with the suicidally miserable ballerina Grusinskaya (Garbo). Garbo goes significantly over the top but that par for the course at a time when no method of acting prevailed. She was a star because she was larger than life and with her faux Russian accent, it was no wonder she was so popular.

Barrymore had a great deal of charm but his role was a thankless one with no terribly great or memorable lines. At least Garbo had her now-famous quip “I want to be alone.” Upstaging as she often was, Crawford’sreserved performance as the strong-headed steno Flaemmchen was the film’s best. Understated, though ultimately rewarding, Crawford made a more unifying presence than did John Barrymore who linked most of the stories together. His brother Lionel was also superb as the fatally-ill working man Otto Kringelein. Kringelein, leaving a job that he loathed, came to Berlin’s most luxurious hotel to get away from his worries and live life for once before he died.

Wallace Beery, who would also that year be taking home an Oscar for The Champ, gave us an uninteresting businessman who we only come to hate as he tries to seduce Flaemmchen and ridicule his former employee Kringelein. When dealing with a pending merger that seems to be faltering, Beery gives us his best work in the film lying his way into a deal.

Grand Hotel is one of those Best Picture winners I could take or leave. It’s a decent film when looked at in a historical context. However, it’s not the powerful work the Academy would recognize two years later in It Happened One Night. Nevertheless, Grand Hotel is an amusing look, even though a fictional one, at the lives of the rich and famous long before Robin Leach.

Review Written

September 28, 2006