Dinner at Eight

What a cast - MGM's finest in a series of vignettes leading up to Mrs Jordan's dinner party (which we never actually see). Jean Harlow is at her wisecracking best and her most stunning; Marie Dressler and John Barrymore are terrific as washed-up actors; everyone is just excellent. Everything that can possibly go wrong does - you can't help but sympathise as Billie Burke's Mrs Jordan gradually gets more and more ruffled by the day's events. Some great one liners and yet another excellent entry on Cukor's CV.

Among the great actresses who have helped to illuminate the silver screen, Marie Dressler may be Chateau d'Yquem – a grand premier cru, in a class all her own. As aging star of the theatuh Carlotta Vance, a living relic of the 'Delmonico' era in New York, she walks away with an immortal movie, as entertaining a contraption as the studio system ever confected. And she does it effortlessly, despite some very tough competition – the most lustrous talent MGM could summon in the worst year of the Depression, and maybe the best it was ever able to gather together in the many constellations it assembled.

Dressler heads a large ensemble cast, with several distinct but interlocking stories, all leading up to (but never quite making) a posh dinner party at the mansion of Billie Burke, wife of shipping magnate Lionel Barrymore. Desperately trying to snag (the unseen) Lord and Lady Ferncliffe – moldering aristocrats she once met at Cap d'Antibes – Burke bullies and badgers everybody she can think of to seat a swank table. Worrying about nothing so much as how 'dressy' the aspic will be – it's the British Lion molded out of a quivering gelatin – she's oblivious to the human dramas whirling around the people on her guest list.

For starters, her husband is not only seriously ill but close to bankruptcy, to boot. Down in his nautical offices on The Battery, he's paid a visit by an old (and older than he) flame, Dressler; a bit down on her luck herself ('I'm flatter than a pancake – I haven't a sou'), she wants to sell her stock in his company. Another visitor, one of the sharks circling around to feast on his bleeding empire. is Wallace Beery, a loud-mouthed boor whom Barrymore nonetheless cajoles Burke into inviting, against her snobbish sensibilities. Beery, a politically connected wheeler-dealer, has problems of his own, namely his wife Jean Harlow. She lounges luxuriously in bed most of the day, changing in and out of fur-trimmed bed jackets and sampling chocolates while waiting for her doctor-lover (Edmund Lowe) to pay another house call under the pretext of tending to her imaginary ailments.

Burke's and Barrymore's young daughter, meanwhile, conceals a clandestine affair with 'free, white and 45" marquee idol John Barrymore, a washed-up drunk whose grandiose airs can't even fool the bellboys he sends out for bottles of hooch (a storyline in the screenplay, co-written by the also alcoholic Herman J. Mankiewicz – from the George S. Kaufmann/Edna Ferber stage hit – that can't have been comfortable for the similarly afflicted Barrymore, who's even referred to in the movie by his emblematic sobriquet 'The Great Profile').

Those are the major strands of the story, but there's even more talent on board: Louise Closser Hale as Burke's pithy cousin; May Robson as the cook in charge of the ill-starred aspic; Lee Tracy, as John Barrymore's exasperated agent; and, deliciously, Hilda Vaughn as Harlow's mercenary maid.

The goings-on range from the farcical to the tragic, and for the most part, the cast does proud in coping with the often drastic shifts of tone (true, some episodes carry more weight than others, some players less inspired than their colleagues; it's an episodic movie, at times dated, from the infancy of talkies when scenes were not a snappily edited few seconds but prolonged and often stagy).

Still, in this starry cast, Dressler shines brightest. A Canadian gal who started in the circus, she worked in vaudeville, theater, and, in the last few decades of her life, in Hollywood. Despite her girth and the delapidations gravity had worked on her face, she's never less than transfixing. She tosses off the requisite comedy as effortlessly as that oldest of pros that she had become, yet can draw the camera to her deeply kohled eyes when she imparts some very bad news and turn it into a few seconds of threnody. (Only Barbara Stanwyck commands so boundless a range, which we have the luxury of observing over several decades of her career; what survives of Dressler dates only from her few last years.) Dressler would make but one more movie before her death, but it's chivalrous to think of Dinner At Eight as her grand exit.

As Dinner At Eight winds down, the aspic never makes it to table, nor do some of the expected guests. But life plods on, if capriciously and unfairly. Burke, at the end of her tether, utters a plangent cry that sums up man's impotence against the cruelty of fate: 'Crabmeat...CRABMEAT!'

I happened across this film today and thoroughly enjoyed it. There is much to be praised in this film, as most of the previous reviews have detailed, so I won't go on long about it. (Though I'd never seen or heard of Marie Dressler before and now I have to find some of her other movies -- anyone else think she resembles Lois Smith?)

What was remarkable to me about the film was its timelessness. So many of the problems and situations embedded in the plot can be found in the headlines of today's newspapers and tabloids. Of course economic downturns, adultery, and social-climbing are common fodder for movies, but it is unusual for classic films to go into some of the nasty details without becoming melodramatic; they describe sexual addiction, for heaven's sake! I've never seen humanity so realistically portrayed in a classic film before (despite the moments that some would call "over-acting") and so this movie made me feel more connected to the past than I have ever before.

When you gather together the great stars of the early 30's, give them a great script, a great director and let them have their head, you get "Dinner at Eight". This is a delightful film which bridges the gap between comedy and drama. Granted, it is a little dated but that it only a minor inconvenience to those of us who love this movie.

You would be hard pressed to find another actress who could play the part of Carlotta Vance with such panache as Marie Dressler.......she is magnificent. She may give the best performance in the film but she has stiff competition from the rest of this star-studded cast.

I find John Barrymore's performance particularly good as it seems to mirror his own career and problems with alcohol. Arranging himself in the right light to capture the great profile one last time is poignant. I am not a Wallace Beery fan but he is spot on as the vulgar, grasping business man with wonderful Jean Harlow as his slutty wife. She is a treat and of course, no one can forget her exchange with Dressler at the end of the film when she announces that she was reading a book! The lovely Billie Burke, who made a film career out of dithering society women (although she was a former Follies beauty and wife of Flo Ziegfeld)is a delight. Lionel Barrymore plays it pretty straight as her long suffering, tragically ill husband. Edmund Lowe passes muster as the philandering doctor and the rest of the supporting cast is as good as it gets.

They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's a movie lovers paradise!

"Dinner at Eight" is a 1933 film that still holds up when viewed by today's audiences. How odd that it wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award. This could be because it is quite similar in form to "Grand Hotel", which won the Best Picture Oscar the year before. It really is more of a comedy/melodrama than pure comedy, since there is much tragedy unfolding during the movie. Aging star Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler) is broke, silent film star Larry Renault (John Barrymore) is "washed up" and a hopeless alcoholic, and Oliver Jordan (Lionel Barrymore) is in danger of losing his shipping business. While these people are all struggling, the only characters that are doing well are the reptilian Dan and Kitty Packard (Wallace Beery and Jean Harlow). Dan Packard is a self-made millionaire with no ethics, and his wife is a gold digger with eyes for another man - her personal physician. The lives of the players all intertwine in ways that are unknown to them, with the depression-era message being that the rules of life have changed in ways that had never occurred in the U.S. before. The vice of the opportunistic social-climbing Packards is rewarded, while the well-heeled of yesteryear, playing by the rules of the past, have nothing but their memories and faded finery left to comfort them.

Of course, there are plenty of comic moments. Billie Burke's performance as Mrs. Jordon is hilarious as her prime concern is that her carefully planned dinner party is coming apart before her very eyes. She comes across as a kinder, gentler Marie Antoinette when she acts like the accidental destruction of her centerpiece dish, a lion-shaped aspic, is the end of the world. Although many have said that Jean Harlow steals this picture, and her talents do shine through, I think Marie Dressler's comic touches really help make the film. For example, when a forty-something secretary mentions that she saw Dressler's character perform "when she was a little girl." Dressler replies that the two must get together some evening and discuss the Civil War. Dressler also makes the very last scene of the movie. As everyone is going into dinner, she finds herself in conversation with Harlow's character. First off, she does a hilarious double-take when Harlow mentions she's been reading a book. Next,Harlow tells Marie Dressler how this book she has been reading says that machinery will soon take over every profession. Marie Dressler looks Jean Harlow up and down as only she could do and says "My dear I don't think you need to worry about that."