room to room
by
Douglas Messerli
William
A. Drake and Edmund Golding [uncredited] (based on Drake’s play, adapted, in
turn on the novel by Vicki Baum) (writers), Edmund Goulding (director) Grand Hotel / 1932
Although
directed by the stolid Hollywood craftsman, Edmund Goulding, who from 1925 to
1958 worked with many of the most notable actresses and actors of the time
(Greta Garbo,
Bette Davis,
Tyrone Power, and even the Marx Brothers in A
Night at the Opera), the portmanteau drama, Grand Hotel, was truly the work of Irving Thalberg, who not only
brought up the rights but whose MGM backed the play on stage before determining
to film it. Shot on a budget of $700,000, the film was one of the most
successful works of the period and his been beloved for generations after,
despite the fact that the puzzle box of often conflicting stories reveals it to
be actually little more than a thread on which to hang a series of star-leaden
monologues.
But then this film did have stars, and
used them to great advantage. As a jewel-thief, Baron Felix von Geigern (John
Barrymore) gets the opportunity to actually have conversation with most of the
films’ characters; and stenographer, Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) also meets at
least three of them. The dying accountant, Otto Krigelein (Lionel Barrymore),
who plans to use up his entire savings just to stay in the luxury of Berlin’s
Grand Hotel, has worked most of his life for self-centered General Director Preysing
(Wallace Beery), and becomes friends with both the Baron and Flaemmchen, with
whom this meek man walks away to new life in Paris. Poor, suffering Grusinskaya
(Greta Garbo) an aging ballerina who famously wants to be alone (“I want to be
alone”) gets that opportunity by encountering only one of the major players,
her would-be lover/and might-have-been robber, the Baron.
In between is a cast of hundreds who, as
Dr. Otternschlag (Lewis Stone) notes “come and go” without anything happening.
While apparently in the past the Baron
has been very successful in his hotel heists, this time he is thwarted—by
love—in stealing Grusinskaya’s pearls and is not allowed to pocket—by friendship
and conscience—Kringelein’s fully stuffed billfold. Without money, he cannot
pay off the thugs for whom he works and, accordingly, cannot run away to a
better life with the Russian dancer. It short he is doomed everywhere he tries
to turn, so it is not surprising that the writers killed him off.
The dying Krigelein, meanwhile, comes to
life, learning how to dance, gamble, drink, and love for the first time in his
life.
Even the hotel porter, Senf (Jean
Hersholt) finally becomes a father to a new-born son, his wife in labor
throughout all the events recounted above.
Only to the disfigured doctor does “nothing”
happen, an irony that surely delighted, as it still does, the film’s admirers.
Looking back at this grand war horse now,
it’s hard not to be an admirer of the truly remarkable set, particularly when
the cameras flit across the bustling hotel lobby, or when they peer down upon the
cascade of circular staircases that take us down into that lobby once again. The
rooms, shot almost as if the film were a noir,
are not elegant places but rather cramped spaces with dark-goings on: drunken
sleep, shady and ecstatic sex, robbery, intended suicide, and murder. Outside,
the grand hotel is precisely that, “quite grand.” but inside it is a pretty
dreary place for those “who want to be alone.” And the movie, despite its
veneer of glamour, is, given the hours it spends inside each of these different
character’s trajectories, often simply depresses one. In the end, we perceive Grand Hotel not so much as a coherent
movie, than as a series of extended vignettes, each tuned to the various
actors’ talents, none of them quite cohering.
We’d later see this style of filmmaking soon
after in Dinner at Eight and in the
dozens of star-leaden but mediocre hotel, airport, and disaster films of the
1960s and 1970s (Airport, The Towering
Inferno, etc.), as well as the satires of the same genre such as Airplane!
As the TV broadcaster of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment puts it, “sit back and
relax as we now present Grand Hotel.”
The only trouble, Jack Lemmon finds, is that the movie, given all the ads
surrounding it, will not be broadcast during the meal he hopes to eat while
watching it. Somewhere, there’s a kind of metaphor in that fact: the grand
banquet the movie seems to offer up doesn’t quite ever delivered, and we’re
left—despite our expectations—still a bit hungry.
Los Angeles, May
5, 2017
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