Best Picture Winner: #5
Release Date: September 11, 1932
Rating: NR
Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes
Director: Edmund Goulding
Quick Impressions:
After Cimarron so bitterly disappointed us, I was relieved to watch Grand Hotel, the first Best Picture winner we’ve encountered so far that I had already seen. “Don’t worry,” I reassured my daughter when she raved about the abysmal horrors of Cimarron to anyone who would listen. “The next one is better. I promise.”
Ordinarily, I never review films that I’ve already seen, but these posts hover somewhere between reviews and the Oscar write-ups I do each year. And this is a strange time. New theatrical releases are in short supply. For the sake of completion, I plan to write about every Best Picture winner we watch, even the ones that aren’t new to me.
Actually, as my daughter and I watched Grand Hotel together, I felt almost like I was seeing it for the first time. My mother always compares Grand Hotel to Dinner at Eight (which she vastly prefers), so I didn’t watch this film too often as a child. In fact, before our screening, I last watched the movie about thirteen years ago with my husband, long before my daughter was even born.
When I think of Grand Hotel, I think of John Barrymore romancing a very theatrical, high strung Greta Garbo. (I tend to forget entirely about Lionel Barrymore and Joan Crawford, even though they’re actually my favorite couple in the movie.) I also remember that when I was my daughter’s age, I read that Marilyn Monroe once confessed that she watched Grand Hotel again and again as a child, even though she really didn’t understand the plot. As someone who both laughed and cried at The Hunt for Red October as a ten-year-old without knowing what the verb “defect” meant, I totally get where she’s coming from. A good cast giving great performances can be spellbinding, whether you know what’s going on or not.
The Plot:
A luxury hotel in Germany doubles as a not-at-all subtle (but still profound) metaphor for life. As the wise doctor observes for our benefit, “People come; people go; nothing ever happens.” The people we follow in this ensemble piece include a genial baron who desperately needs money (John Barrymore), a prima ballerina on the verge of despair (Greta Garbo), a plucky stenographer who will do just about anything if she’s paid (Joan Crawford), a pompous business owner who makes increasingly poor moral choices (Wallace Beery), a dying man who wants to go out in style (Lionel Barrymore), and a wounded doctor full of wise observations who sometimes seems more like the narrator of The Twilight Zone than a real person (Lewis Stone).
The Good:
Grand Hotel is a great film. It was great ninety years ago. It’s great today. After watching it, my daughter and I ranked the Best Picture winners we’ve watched so far. For me, Grand Hotel is probably #1, possibly tied with Wings. My daughter ranks it just a hair below Wings, possibly tied with All Quiet on the Western Front. We liked it.
As I said, for me, the most memorable performance in the film is Greta Garbo as Madame Grusinskaya, the Russian ballet star who feels the audience’s love for her slipping and cannot cope emotionally with this change. Garbo makes such an indelible impression in this role because she is larger than life. Her theatrical, dramatic moods are easy to mock, of course. Of all the cast, Garbo is the one we watch and remember, “Oh yes, she was a silent star,” because her face is so dramatic, her actions so huge. Her entire aura shoves right through the centuries and jumps off the TV screen. But you don’t forget her. And in the end of the film particularly, you really feel for her. The performance she gives is so enormous that initially it seems almost comical, but it end, it works. (My daughter made quizzical faces in the beginning, and we told lots of jokes together, but by the end of the movie, she was yelling at the screen in distress.)
Also divas actually are this theatrical. Not so long ago, I loved watching Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina at the Olympics. Her diva-like intensity perfectly complemented her gymnastic skill. (And for the record, I think it’s more normal than people seem to acknowledge that someone with insane skill who puts in punishing work would feel big emotions.) Garbo is clearly playing this kind of big, intense personality.
She’s well paired with John Barrymore. It’s also clear why he was a silent film star. My mother always says that Lionel Barrymore is a better actor than John. (She says it a lot. You could say something even tangentially related like, “Netflix cancelled Santa Clarita Diet!” and she’ll say, “Lionel Barrymore was a better actor than John!” I agree Lionel Barrymore kind of steals this movie, but I think John is a good actor, too. Though he does have the sorts of exaggerated facial expressions you would expect from a leading man of silent film, I think these only seem potentially “too much” because of how relentlessly Gene Kelly mocked such acting in Singin’ in the Rain. Although I wasn’t swooning over him myself, Barrymore is the first leading man we’ve seen during this project whose character I would agree to have dinner with. So far, my daughter and I have not been thrilled with the behavior of 1930s leading men. At least I see the baron’s appeal. As written, the character is easy to love since it is always when no one is looking that he chooses to do the right thing. But Barrymore’s performance helps, too.
There’s this great moment early on when Barrymore first meets a self-styled “stenographess” played by Joan Crawford. His delivery of the line, “I don’t suppose you’d take some dictation from me some time?” lets the audience know immediately that all innuendo is fully intended. That is good acting. Not everyone could get the point across without actually saying or doing something censurable. Another actor could deliver the line differently, and the audience would still make the joke, but they’d think they had come up with it themselves.
Speaking of Joan Crawford, she’s great in this movie, too. I’ll confess that I never saw many of Crawford’s films until I was an adult. My grandma hated her. A lot. (She had it in for several old movie stars. If it weren’t for Lauren Bacall and Hayley Mills, we could never have enjoyed watching anything together. But she particularly hated Joan Crawford.) I was introduced to Crawford’s infamy before her acting. Watching Mommy Dearest actually made me feel sorry for her (which, I realize is not the intended reaction). All I could think was, “Wouldn’t it be horrible to be so desperate for love that you surround yourself with people dependent on you and force them to love you, and then they hate you so much?” Child abuse is repugnant, of course, but that’s still sad. Anyway, despite the numerous scandals of her personal life, Crawford is a good actress, too, and she gives a great performance here as Flaemmchen, the stenographer who has come along sixty years too early to play the lead in Pretty Woman. The actress may have staggering baggage, but both her character and her performance are remarkably sympathetic.
Wallace Beery gets the most boring part in the movie. He gives a great performance, too, (though I don’t understand why he’s doing an accent when no one else is. They’re all German!). His character sounds exciting on paper. He’s rich. He makes big deals. He’s a liar. He cheats on his wife. He’s a murderer (kind of). How salacious! Yet he’s actually very dull. Strangely, it is the humanity and the kindness of the other characters that make them interesting, not their flashy sins. Business magnate Preysing does interest me in one way, though. He seems to have a totally different view of himself than others have of him. By his own description, he has been an honest man, and now he begins a slippery slope to sin. He makes one moral misstep, and then since he’s committed one sin, he decides to commit all the others at once. Why not? Beery does a fantastic job of showing us the man’s agony as he falls apart. But Lionel Barrymore’s character describes a very different man, a Preysing who was never as honest as he said, even in the beginning. That’s curious.
As Dr. Otternschlag, Lewis Stone almost seems like a ghost. His character has all the lines that pointedly compare the Grand Hotel to life. But the longer I watched, the more I found myself thinking, “Is this hotel a metaphor for life, or is it some kind of purgatory?” There’s an eerie ghostliness to Stone’s character. Of course, he has survived the Great War. (But does anybody ever survive battle intact?)
For me, the best performance in the movie is given by Lionel Barrymore, who pretty much steals the film as the terminally ill Otto Kringelein. Blustering speeches sometimes derail movies, but Lionel Barrymore’s only enhance this one. He’s so fantastic in this role, playing the film’s least morally complicated and most sympathetic character by a mile. He’s the man who speaks truth without fear because he knows he’s going to die. Barrymore deftly makes him both endearingly sweet and righteously bold. And honestly, the character’s virtue makes the baron more sympathetic, too, because he was able to recognize and uplift the worthiness of Kringelein. Lionel Barrymore basically steals the movie, and if you view him as the surprise protagonist, then the film also has a happy ending.
“This was hard to compare to All Quiet on the Western Front,” my daughter said afterwards, “because Grand Hotel has such a happy ending. Well…maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like it has a happy ending.” Yes, it does feel like that, thanks to fine performances by Joan Crawford and, especially, Lionel Barrymore. Greta Garbo has a lot to do with generating the strange euphoria of the film’s final moments, too.
For me, this film is the best of the Oscar winning pictures we’ve viewed so far (though as I said, Wings is right there with it and definitely has more impressive technical achievements). What I love about Grand Hotel beyond its excellent performances (by stars I know) is the film’s wonderful writing. It was apparently adapted from a stage play (by William A. Drake) that was itself adapted from a novel (by Austrian writer Vicki Baum). The writing I love. This movie is infectiously quotable. Every ten seconds, I found myself struggling to scribble down another quotable line before the next ear-catching line was delivered. And the character development is exceptional, especially compared to what we’ve seen so far. All of these characters feel real (with the possible exception of the doctor who has an eerie quality. Clearly, though, the war has taken a toll on him. The horrors of war and the grip of alcoholism do explain his behavior and make him realistically drawn, too). All of these people are psychologically complex and behave in realistic and interesting ways. Each star performance is a character study of a highly complex individual in an unexpected and evolving situation. I love movies like this, so it’s not surprising that Grand Hotel works for me.
Best Scene:
The entire cast can act, and the script is fantastic, so every scene of this film is good. But Lionel Barrymore pretty much steals the movie with his impassioned, long-winded, exhausting confrontation with Wallace Beery’s Preysing at the bar. In 2020, the broken working man’s complaint that his callous rich employer has refused him sick leave and worked him to death really resonates. So the themes of the speech are timely. Barrymore just has such fantastic delivery, too. A bad actor would butcher this moment. Barrymore knows just how to deliver this wheezing, grandstanding display of fiery righteousness.
Best Scene Visually:
John Barrymore and Greta Garbo own this movie visually. They themselves are the best visuals. But their scenes are also unusually visually inventive compared to the rest of the film. The scene when the baron climbs around the outside of the hotel to steal the pearls features fascinating camera angles. Then almost immediately, we get Garbo’s dress that almost seems to pair with the lamp. Her room is also replete with curtains creating such eye-catching lines and shadow.
Just after this, there’s an aerial view of Lionel Barrymore’s room that is quite eye-catching, as well. But nothing tops the Barrymore/Garbo scenes visually.
Best Action Sequence:
Of course, Wallace Beery’s last big moment of action is gripping—largely because of Joan Crawford, who really sells it—but more riveting to me is the scene between the Barrymore brothers when Kringelein can’t find his pocketbook. My daughter almost had a stroke watching. She was on the edge of her seat, beside herself with worry.
The Negatives:
This is a petty thing, but I don’t understand why of the principal cast, only Wallace Beery has a German accent. Did he just insist on doing one? Was he the only star who could pull the accent off? It’s very weird. The hotel is in Berlin. Everybody else is supposed to be German, too, except for Greta Garbo who is playing a Russian ballerina. Some members of the hotel staff have German(ish) accents, but the stars of the movie all just speak in basically their own voices with the pointed exception of Wallace Beery. Is he from a different region of Germany? But Lionel Barrymore’s character works for him and seems to have met him personally in passing before. For the record, Beery’s accent isn’t comical or anything. I’m just not sure why he’s the only person attempting one. It certainly didn’t shatter the illusion or take me out of the movie. He still gives a captivating performance of a man losing grip on his soul. The accent just seems like a weird choice.
Garbo’s performance is also conspicuously (almost ridiculously) melodramatic, but then, so is her character. But you know what? No matter how big and showy and extreme the character’s behavior is, her pain is real. Once she is alone (as she believes), she clearly demonstrates the reality of her pain. It’s not just performance. To be honest, I’m confused how I feel about Garbo’s performance. She is extremely melodramatic, but she’s also so memorable. Playing an ordinary woman, Joan Crawford seems like a normal human being. She’s relatable and down to earth and captivating, too. Garbo seems like a being from another world. The effect is both good and bad. I don’t know what to make of it in the end.
From a 2020 vantage point, I also find it baffling and frustrating that the baron refuses to take Grusinskaya’s money. I mean, it would be such a simple solution. He says, “I need money desperately.” She says, “No problem. I have a zillion dollars.” He says, “Okay. Great.” No more problem.
“Why can’t you take the money?” I yelled at him.
My daughter replied, “That’s not the proper way, Mom. Not if you want to give dictation.”
Too bad she didn’t fall in love with Joan Crawford! She would have taken the money! She would have gotten on the train for 5,000 marks and married her for ten. Stupid male pride!
It’s tragically comical, though. People keep offering the baron money, and he keeps refusing it. You almost get the feeling it’s professional pride. He must not be given that money by a good person. He must instead steal the money, from a mark who is in no way tragic or appealing. Poor baron!
And the film is dated in some ways, of course. I got a kick out of the moment when Joan Crawford casts aside the fun cocktail they’re all having and instead orders absinthe.
Overall:
Grand Hotel is a great film and certainly a worthy Best Picture winner. It is dated in some ways. (Can you imagine? There was a time, long, long ago when people used to risk staying in hotels!) But it’s captivating as a character study and as a star showcase. And even in 2020, it’s easy to root for Lionel Barrymore’s mistreated working man staring death in the eye and laughing at life.