Grand Hotel (1932): Shira's Take

I think my feelings about Grand Hotel can be summed up in four simple words: I just don’t care. Between Greta Garbo’s flighty-Tennessee-Williams-leading-lady-esque performance as ballerina Grusinskaya and the doctor’s Phantom of the Opera face (played by Lewis Stone), I yawned and yawned and tried not to fall asleep. Don’t get me wrong—performances were great. John Barrymore as the Baron Von Geigern played the part of an ambivalent thief charmingly and wonderfully. At times, watching Joan Crawford (the stenographer Flaemmchen), I felt like I was watching a movie from the 1940s or 1950s with highly superior acting. And of course the fumbling, adorable Lionel Barrymore (Kringelein) was delightful. Everything about Grand Hotel was technically fantastic. I just couldn’t stay interested in the story. In theory, I do like this type of movie (see: Chinatown). Some crazy stuff happens, we get wrapped up in it, and it ends with someone settling the audience down. The Grand Hotel, “where nothing ever happens”, has a perfect ending speech by the (Phantom) doctor. In retrospect, I like it all a lot more than when I was suffering through it. Notes to myself: OMG DACHSHUND. SO KYOOT. 6/10

Grand Hotel (1932): Eitan's Take

Not much to say about Grand Hotel. The tagline of the movie pretty much sums it up -- "Grand Hotel. People coming, people going, nothing ever happens." This was a truly painful movie to sit through. It was bloated, dull, and a waste of time for its astonishingly talented actors. You would think that if they got Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery in a film together, they would give them more to work with than a bunch of tawdry and uninteresting affairs, arguments about alcohol, business mergers, and a woe-is-me ballerina. Seriously. This film bumbled along from one lame set piece to the next, with occasional respites during which Lionel Barrymore's pathetic drunk of a character ruminated on life, death, and Louisiana Flips (a cocktail of some sort that he rattles on about for 5 minutes). Considering the sharp, intelligent screenplays of many of the other movies I've seen from this era, the Academy should have been ashamed to reward this bland snapshot of elitist German jerks whose pithy life concerns are more of a dull embarrassment than a genuine commentary on humanity or society.

I know that the Academy picked this movie because it was a "multi-faceted" experience with several intertwining storylines (a la Robert Altman and P.T. Anderson films, and in the dreary and vapid Crash) inhabited by gorgeous rising stars and the reverently-viewed veterans of the silent era -- the toast of Hollywood, to be sure. It's a shame that the movie is about as tasteless and undesirable as burnt toast. I am happy that the bloated egos of this era were lampooned so marvelously in Sunset Blvd., a truly great and dark movie about the stupid life of the rich and famous. If this movie had had any darkness, or any twinge of irony, or any sort of joking self-awareness, it might have been redeemable. Its skull-crushing banality and self-seriousness earn it my contempt. Those points were earned by a loving conversation between John Barrymore and a dachshund, as well as a late-in-the-game murder twist (that wasn't even explored very well.)

"You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave." 4/10