Berlin’s plushest, most expensive hotel is the setting where, in the words of Dr. Otternschlag, “people come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”
The doctor is usually drunk, so he misses the fact that Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore) is broke and trying to steal eccentric dancer Grusinskaya’s (Greta Garbo) pearls. He ends up stealing her heart instead.
Powerful German businessman Preysing (Wallace Beery) brow beats Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), one of his company’s lowly bookkeepers, but it is the terminally ill Kringelein who holds all the cards in the end.
Meanwhile, the Baron also steals the heart of Preysing’s mistress, Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), but she doesn’t end up with either one of them in the end…
Grand Hotel reminds me of Gosford Park or Clue. A bunch of random people gather at a large house or hotel, and throughout the course of the movie, we discover how their lives are connected.
Doing a little research online, I found out that Grand Hotel was originally conceived by an MGM production chief as one of the first All-Star vehicles. Conventional wisdom at the time was that you put no more than one or two of your biggest stars in a picture, so as to lower production cost and to maximize profits. Grand Hotel featured 5 of MGM’s top tiered stars and was one of the highest grossing pictures in studio history.
Of course, any time you have more than one or two stars on set, there are bound to be some problems.
There are no scenes where Garbo and Crawford are in the same frame. This was done to eliminate the possibility that one star might upstage the other. And Crawford was irked by Garbo’s insistence on top billing and decided to take her revenge. Knowing that Garbo loathed tardiness and Marlene Dietrich in equal measures, Crawford played Dietrich records between shots and made sure to arrive late on set.
Also, I think this is the only film I’ve ever seen Greta Garbo in. Or John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, or even Joan Crawford. Hmm… I wonder if I’ll run into them again as I continue to make my way through the list of Best Picture winners.
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