Grand Hotel
January 23rd, 2010 by dennis
- In this great screen drama, the glitz and glitter of Berlin’s opulent Grand Hotel comes alive with its star-studded guests and employees: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore.Year: 1932 Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR Age: 012569675162 UPC: 012569675162 Manufacturer No: 67516
Description
In this great screen drama, the glitz and glitter of Berlin’s opulent Grand Hotel comes alive with its star-studded guests and employees: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. Year: 1932Amazon.com essential video
This Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a sweeping soap opera about the guests at the Grand Hotel. Several plots intertwine, but mostly it’s about Stars! Stars! Stars! Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Bee…
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- Posted in Hotel
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:13 am
I’ve seen this movie several times, and have always hated it. I don’t know why – I love old movies, but I find this one impossible. Garbo is simply bad – incredible histrionics and inexplicable gyrations and shakes of the shoulders which I’m sure were meant to demonstrate her character as a ballerina, but which look only odd to the modern viewer. The whole film is stilted and shallow. The only other “classic film” I’ve ever come away from feeling shafted by was “Mrs. Miniver” for, I think, similar reasons. I think the modern viewer is simply incapable of viewing these movies in the spirit in which they were intended.
Rating: 2 / 5
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:46 am
This is probably unfair to say, because the book “Grand Hotel” was based on has been out of print for decades and is incredibly hard to find, but this blockbuster Oscar-winning classic film is NOTHING compared to Vicki Baum’s 1930 original German novel, “People in a Hotel”. I happened across the book in a dusty corner of a dusty used bookstore purely on a lark, never having seen the film, and didn’t stop reading until the last page. It was one of the most moving, beautifully-written novels I’ve ever read; Vicki Baum’s grasp of human nature, from bellhops to barons, is astonishing, and the writing (with assist from translator Basil Creighton) is heartbreaking and thrilling. Just check out this little passage. Grusinskaya (played by Greta Garbo in the movie), the aging, despondent fading-star ballerina, has just finished a dance:
“Curtain and applause. There was even fairly vigorous applause considering how empty the theater was and how few there were to clap. ‘Encore?’ asked Grusinskaya without stirring from her pose. ‘No,’ whispered Pimenov in a loud and desperate whisper from the wings. The applause was over. It was over. Grusinskaya still lay where she was for a few minutes like a flake of foam, just as she had died in her dance and with the dust of the stage on her hands and arms and temples. For the first time in her life there was no encore for this dance. I can do no more, she thought. No, I have done enough. I can do no more.”
Unfortunately this heartbreaking scene wasn’t in the movie; it gave volumes of explanation as to why Grusinskaya was suicidal, so without it, Garbo just comes off as a melodramatic nutjob. There are many such scenes from the book that were chopped up or cut out altogether that would have added so much, and without them the film just jumps from plotpoint to plotpoint with little rhyme or reason. I know that 90% of any book has to go when being translated from book to movie—and I know that Vicki Baum herself wrote the screenplay, so it was hardly a hack job—but it just seems that so much beauty was packed into so little time that there was no way to really connect with these amazing characters. The acting was brilliant, of course (although why in hell ultra-American Wallace Beery had a German accent when nobody else did I have no idea), but it just left me sad and angered that this magnificent novel, now all but forgotten, leaves its only trace on the world with this watchable but hugely flawed movie. It could have been so much more. If you ever find the book, no matter what condition it’s in, BUY IT. Maybe someday if enough people squawk, it’ll come back into print.
Rating: 3 / 5
January 23rd, 2010 at 9:04 am
The movie is relentlessly grim, even in it’s lighter moments. Garbo and John Barrymore’s hammy scenes together are embarrassing.
But John is really endearing in his scenes with brother Lionel Barrymore. Also, Joan Crawford (!) gives the most understated and brilliant performance of the entire cast.
Worth a look, but as a whole is a little heavy-handed.
Rating: 3 / 5
January 23rd, 2010 at 9:26 am
Yep, “Grand Hotel”, MGMs star-studded extravaganza.
Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Lionel & John Barrymore, Wallace Beery and
more.
The art deco sets are incredible.
I never understood the attraction 30’s audiences had with Greta “I
vant to be alone” Garbo.
She’s not much of a “looker” and her acting is, at best, mediocre.
Her character, as written, is laughably pathetic. Poor widdle Greta,
she vants to be alone. Maybe she should go to the theatre where she
dances – nobody’s there!
Lionel Barrymore cringing, whining character is also a bit annoying.
Wallace Beery is great, John Barrymore’s hamminess works for him in
this movie, Joan Crawford is beautiful and turns in a credible
performance.
The DVD is great, lots of bonus extras and the video quality is excellent.
Rating: 5 / 5
January 23rd, 2010 at 10:39 am
Lets face it, “Grand Hotel” is essentially a soap opera, albeit an entertaining one, with ornate trappings. What distinguishes this film from the mundane is it’s incredible cast(Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery) who breathe life into otherwise ordinary material. I would recommend this film to anyone who want to see these screen legends in an ensemble setting. That said, a better film of this type is “Dinner at Eight”. Not only does that film include the Barrymores and Beery but also a simply dazzling Jean Harlowe performance.
Rating: 4 / 5