Hotel Splendide

This is quite a fun short feature from Michael Powell that sees clerk "Jerry" (Jerry Verno) come into an inheritance. It's not quite what he was expecting after he rather unceremoniously hands in his notice to his boss, indeed when he arrives at the eponymous establishment he discovers it's pretty much on it's last legs. Not to be outdone, though, he revamps and relaunches the hotel to a fanfare and a full house - but are the guests there for the hospitality or for some much more nefarious reason? The latter soon becomes evident as the hotel is reputedly the resting place of the famous Dysart Pearls - pinched decades earlier. Can "Jerry" collect the £10,000 reward or will one of his motley collection of guests beat him to the prize? There's a lovely scene towards the end when they are all traipsing up the stairs, nobody sure who can be trusted and who cannot and the ending, well I quite liked the simplicity of that. It's all a bit basic, the production and dialogue really don't give any signals as to things to come from Powell - but it's short, sweet and really quite enjoyable for an hour.

An advantage of a really short film is that if your final ten minutes are really fun then they end up representing a much larger percentage of the overall experience than in a normal feature length film. This allows those final ten minutes to elevate the viewing more fully, providing a capper with greater effect. Well, that's what happens with Hotel Splendide, Michael Powell's second surviving feature where the first 40 minutes are a slightly amusing look at a combination of comedy of errors and criminal investigation which bleed into a final ten minutes that takes everything that came before and resolves it with a light and confident touch.

Jerry Mason (Jerry Verno) is a clerk in an office who dreams of bigger things, manifested by his reading a book about how to be more confident while sneaking into his superior's office to playact to himself with a mirror, dominating his own image, an embarrassing situation that gets found out. At the same time, Gentleman Charlie (Edgar Norfolk) has just been released from prison after five years without ever giving up where he hid some expensive pearls which he buried on the Western coast of England in a spot that his compatriot tells him is now occupied by the titular Hotel Splendide. Coincidentally enough, Jerry receives notice that his uncle has died, leaving him the Hotel in his testament. So, we're off for our two characters to arrive at the same place at nearly the same time with different purposes.

None of this is as awkwardly presented as the early sound effort Rynox. There are still heavy signs of the primitive nature of the sound equipment (there's only one sequence with music, for instance, since multi-track mixing was still not within the small Film Engineering company's grasp), but Powell's stretching his limits as much as he can. Soundscapes tend to be a bit more even, especially since he allows cuts in the middle of dialogue from one shot to a reverse with the sound of the first shot continuing, and he even uses ADR to work through what must have been troubling sound issues on set (lips don't quite match in a few scenes while there's a certain hollow sound to things, like the actors are in a booth not on set). It's all done to make the sound better, though, meaning that Powell was not happy to just accept the limited tools he had at his disposal as they were.

Anyway, the comedy of errors comes up as Jerry shows up to the hotel with dreams of a glorious seaside retreat deserving of its name, only to find a house with a few rooms run by the sweet Joyce (Vera Sherborne) and populated by a handful of stolid, older people. Jerry has large ideas about how to bring in new guests, digging up the garden to put up a flag, accidentally finding the tin with the jewels, and casting them aside, before Charlie shows up ready to dig for his own part. There's business about showing two couples the same set of rooms that's fun to play out. There's business around the dinners, Jerry's sense of pomposity regarding his position, and the maid's exasperation of everything. It's lightly amusing.

And then we start getting reveals about an old woman, a secret investigation, what's in the box, double crosses, and it's all captured in the last ten minutes or so. I wouldn't go so far as to call this section madcap, but it's as close as Powell was probably ever going to get. And it's really quite fun, especially when a cat is discovered, almost the whole hotel's population has gathered around it, and they tiptoe behind it in line as "Funeral March of the Marionettes" takes over the soundtrack.

Is it a great comedy of the era? No, but it is fun in that genteel British sort of way. It's a light comedy, something made for cheap and fast because it was a quota quickie, and that actually makes it somewhat more impressive. I saw how Powell strained under similar circumstances with Rynox, a film that was amusing enough but never quite came together. This feels much more accomplished and well assembled, like Powell was suddenly much more comfortable with the process. The locations and sets feel more natural. The film feels less confined, even if it does only really exist on 3 sets (perhaps more, depending on how you count the Hotel Splendide rooms), and everyone feels like they have an appropriate amount of space to operate within the film's limited running time.

Really, for a 52-minute film, that actually feels like something of an accomplishment on its own.

So, it's a small treasure of a discovery from Powell's earliest days. It was fun.