Edmund Goulding's 1932 romantic drama Grand Hotel is an even mixture of comedy, romance and drama, and one of the first films whose plot consists of filling a busy building/place with an eccentric group of people and then observing the many different ways their actions and lives intertwine with each other.
The film is set in Berlin's plush and opulent Grand Hotel just a few years before World War II. The Hotel is the home to an assortment of odd characters, including the broke but charming Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore) who resorts to burgling to support himself and who tries to steal pearls from the depressed and moody ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) only to end up falling in love with her instead.
Also staying at the Grand hotel is powerful German businessman Preysing (Wallace Beery), his aspiring-actress secretary Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), and a terminally-ill bookkeeper named Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) who used to work for Preysing but now lives in the Hotel determined to live out the rest of his short life in opulence and splendor. It doesn't take long before all of these lives become intertwined with one another, some in insignificant ways, and others in ways that will change lives forever.
Goulding's film starts off slow, beginning with an overhead shot of some telephone operators and then leisurely revealing the principal characters and the lives they are living. However, once all of the characters have been introduced, the film quickly picks up speed and things then proceed on at a faster, sometimes manic pace as the characters romance, scheme or confront one another.
The cinematography and set-design are perfect at creating a hotel that is both elegant and utterly bland, a place where people are surrounded by opulence and extravagance and yet everyone is desperately searching for money or happiness as the country outside the hotel falls deeper into an economic depression.
And yet, despite the films beauty and haunting atmosphere, Grand Hotel hasn't exactly aged as well as other films from the same era. Its characters are not given much depth and they come off more like archetypes than three-dimensional characters.
However, despite the predictable of the character's actions and their simple development, the Barrymore brothers do an admirable job breathing some life into their characters, as does almost all of the principal cast save for Greta Gabor, whose acting is so overly dramatic and hammy that makes sympathizing with her suicidal ballerina character somewhat of a challenge.
But while Grand Hotel is hardly the best film to come out of the pre-Code Hollywood era, its lavish sets, eccentric characters, and elegant cinematography make it a film worth seeing at least once, if only because it helped to set the stage for later all-star films like those directed by Robert Altman and Woody Allen.
Find the nearest Blockbuster near your home so you can rent this film almost immediately. Or, if you prefer that movies came to you instead, set up a Netflix account and start your ordering as soon as possible.
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