Rent Grand Hotel (1932)

All Life in One Lobby - Grand Hotel review by griggs

Luxury hotels thrive on bustle, and Grand Hotel turns it into spectacle. Edmund Goulding directs with a theatrical flourish, choreographing a constant flow of arrivals and departures through one ornate lobby. It’s a stage-bound film, but Goulding leans into that artifice, letting the intersecting plots feel like acts in a grand play.

The ensemble is stacked: Garbo’s weary ballerina steals the spotlight even as she cries for solitude, while John Barrymore glides through as a thief with disarming elegance. Lionel Barrymore provides the pathos as a dying clerk desperate to taste life, while Wallace Beery chews the scenery as a bullying industrialist. Joan Crawford, meanwhile, quietly anchors things with a performance that’s warmer and sharper than the film sometimes deserves.?It’s melodramatic, yes, but handled with a polish that keeps it from tipping into excess. 

The stories weave together with surprising clarity, offering a glittering portrait of love, greed, despair, and chance encounters — the whole messy churn of humanity under one roof.

Heavy Soap. - Grand Hotel review by Steve

This is the sort of prestigious production that MGM had in mind when they claimed to have more stars than there are in heaven. It is based on a hit Broadway play, itself adapted from Vicki Baum's popular German novel about 24 hours in a luxury hotel in Weimar Berlin. There are three interlinked stories which reflect differences in social class.

So there's the aristocrat with John Barrymore as a hard up gentleman jewel thief. And the capitalist with Wallace Beery as an overbearing, crooked Prussian businessman. Greta Garbo is the artist, as a the most temperamental prima-ballerina in pictures. And then the workers: Joan Crawford as a jazz-babe stenographer; and Lionel Barrymore as a gauche, dying accountant.

They all basically play their star image. None of them is particularly appealing, but Beery is the nominated bad guy. It takes quite a lot of effort to get all the drama and the egos off the ground and the first hour lacks vitality. Eventually the situations engage, but there is nothing inspired here. It's well directed with a lavish budget, but it is hard to care.

It won the Oscar for best film, maybe because of the stars. Now, Barrymore looks shabby and Garbo is tiresomely theatrical. She does utter the immortal line: 'I want to be alone'. Crawford comes off best. The art deco sets and the fashions- by Adrian- are chic. It's the quintessence of what a big MGM drama was in '32. But now feels overwrought and weary.