Edmund Goulding's 1932 film "Grand Hotel", about 48 hours in a plush German hotel has a dream cast. Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is a Russian prima ballerina in town for several performances, who is lonely, a drama queen, and suicidal. She meets Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore) a hotel thief who inadvertently is in her room (having been in the process of stealing some jewelry) when she is about to commit suicide, and stays the night with her, convincing her not to end things. The two fall in love, of course, much to the disappointment of Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford), a woman that von Geigern was romancing the day before. Flaemmchen is a stenographer, and her boss, German tycoon Preysing (Wallace Beery) is having a hard time with a merger he is trying to transact. One of Preysing's employees at a factory he owns is bookkeeper Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore). Otto is staying at the hotel because he only has a short time to live, so he takes his entire life savings and decides to live the rest of his life in luxury. Throughout the 48 hours that the action takes place, friendships are made, loves are found and lost, and a murder changes the lives of all of the main characters.
"Grand Hotel" won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1932, and it is easy to see why. The film is an epic without having an enormous cast or exotic locales. From the films that I have seen of this decade, this is one of the first examples of an intertwining narrative structure. We are used to seeing this now; (think Altman, in particular) where characters are all somehow connected, even though they may not even know each other. Another fine early example that I can recall was a decade later with "Tales of Manhattan". The acting is incredible, though Garbo's REALLY over-the-top performance was a bit much. Realizing that she was a drama queen as a profession, I excused a lot of it, but it got to a point where I was really snickering to myself after awhile, because she was acting just like Gloria Swanson later would in "Sunset Boulevard". One explanation could be that this was still a really early stage of the talking picture, and silent films solely relied on gestures and facial expressions to convey emotion. I was very impressed with the performances of the Barrymore brothers (I've always loved Lionel Barrymore), and was stunned by Crawford's talent as well as beauty.
"Grand Hotel" is rife with melodrama, but it was not hackneyed or maudlin. I am actually quite surprised it isn't on the IMDb top 250 list; I found it to be that good. I am a big fan of Douglas Sirk's melodramatic films of the 1940's and 1950's, and "Grand Hotel" is a great predecessor of that genre. 7/10 --Shelly
