Day 29: People Come, People Go, Nothing Ever Happens

GRAND HOTEL (1932)

Directed by Edmund Goulding

Starring: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Lewis Stone

An aging prima ballerina (Garbo), A jewel thief posing as a dignitary (John Barrymore), an upwardly mobile stenographer (Crawford), A desperate German businessman (Beery) and a man dying of cancer (Lionel Barrymore) all have their lives intertwine at the Grand Hotel in Berlin, where they say “nothing ever happens.”  But if nothing ever happened, we wouldn’t have much of a story, would we?  What starts as casual encounters by our stars quickly turns into romance, intrigue and eventually murder.

It was almost unheard of at the time for a film to boast this many stars in one film.  Most star vehicles featured two at the most, but here we have five of MGM’s top stars in one of the greatest ensemble pieces in movie history.  

The film is melodramatic in the extreme, but it is the performances that set this apart from most other films of this type.  Garbo is captivating as the depressed ballerina.  John Barrymore is equally intense and sensitive as the jewel thief whose conscience eventually gets the best of him.  Crawford is surprisingly cute as the coquettish stenographer.  Beery plays a great bully who will do anything to save his business.  But it is Lionel Barrymore as the dying man who steals the show in almost every scene he’s in.  He is the sweetest, most loveable man who decides to live it up in his final days, taking in everything in life he’s missed out on by sitting behind a desk his whole life.  He is the one person in this piece that (almost) everyone likes.  More than that, he is the moral center of the story; a good man who wants nothing more than to enjoy himself and help his newfound friends at the same time.  

Grand Hotel is the only winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture that wasn’t even nominated for any other awards that year.  Which is odd, considering the power of Lionel Barrymore’s performance and the wonderful cinematography.  But it must be said that the film is greater than the sum of its parts.  It really was nothing more than a showcase of the best MGM had to offer; really more of an advertisement for the studio than anything else.  But the fact that it works as well as it does says something for director Edmund Goulding.  Putting up with all those conflicting egos on the same set had to have been a daunting task, to say the least.  

This film is certainly worth a look, especially for those who have a fondness for Old Hollywood in all its glory.  It has its flaws (specifically, it drags at times and is way too long), but for a glimpse of the star power that used to exist in the early days of cinema, it’s tough to top Grand Hotel.