Edmund Goulding | Grand Hotel / 1932

room to room

 

William A. Drake and Edmund Golding (screenplay, based on Drake’s play, adapted from the novel by Vicki Baum), Edmund Goulding (director) Grand Hotel / 1932

 

Although directed by the stolid Hollywood craftsman, Edmund Goulding, who from 1925 to 1958 worked with many of the most notable actresses and actors of the time (Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, and even the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera), the portmanteau drama, Grand Hotel, was truly the work of Irving Thalberg, who not only brought up the rights but whose MGM backed the play on stage before determining to film it. Shot on a budget of $700,000, the film was one of the most successful works of the period and his been beloved for generations after, despite the fact that the puzzle box of often conflicting stories reveals it to be actually little more than a thread on which to hang a series of star-leaden monologues.

     But then this film did have stars, and used them to great advantage. As a jewel-thief, Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore) gets the opportunity to actually have conversation with most of the films’ characters; and stenographer, Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) also meets at least three of them. The dying accountant, Otto Krigelein (Lionel Barrymore), who plans to use up his entire savings just to stay in the luxury of Berlin’s Grand Hotel, has worked most of his life for self-centered General Director Preysing (Wallace Beery), and becomes friends with both the Baron and Flaemmchen, with whom this meek man walks away to new life in Paris. Poor, suffering Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) an aging ballerina who famously wants to be alone (“I want to be alone”) gets that opportunity by encountering only one of the major players, her would-be lover/and might-have-been robber, the Baron. 

     In between is a cast of hundreds who, as Dr. Otternschlag (Lewis Stone) notes “come and go” without anything happening.

       Of course, between these others a great deal does happen. Preysing fails to make a deal that might save his failing company, attempts to buy a relationship with Flaemmchen, and, finally, kills off the work’s “hero,” if a hotel thief—even as nicely mannered and basically principled as the baron is—might be described as a hero. 

       While apparently in the past the Baron has been very successful in his hotel heists, this time he is thwarted—by love—in stealing Grusinskaya’s pearls and is not allowed to pocket—by friendship and conscience—Kringelein’s fully stuffed billfold. Without money, he cannot pay off the thugs for whom he works and, accordingly, cannot run away to a better life with the Russian dancer. It short he is doomed everywhere he tries to turn, so it is not surprising that the writers killed him off.

     The poverty-stricken Flaemmchen falls in love with the Baron, takes up Presysing’s offer for a more temporarily "intimate" relationship, and runs away with Krigelein.

     The dying Krigelein, meanwhile, comes to life, learning how to dance, gamble, drink, and love for the first time in his existence.

    Even the hotel porter, Senf (Jean Hersholt) finally becomes a father to a new-born son, his wife in labor throughout all the events recounted above.

     Only to the disfigured doctor does “nothing” happen, an irony that surely delighted, as it still does, the film’s admirers.

     Looking back at this grand war horse now, it’s hard not to be an admirer of the truly remarkable set, particularly when the cameras flit across the bustling hotel lobby, or when they peer down upon the cascade of circular staircases that take us down into that lobby once again. The rooms, shot almost as if the film were a noir, are not elegant places but rather cramped spaces with dark-goings on: drunken sleep, shady and ecstatic sex, robbery, intended suicide, and murder. Outside, the grand hotel is precisely that,  “quite grand.” but inside it is a pretty dreary place for those “who want to be alone.” And the movie, despite its veneer of glamour, is, given the hours it spends inside each of these different character’s trajectories, often simply depresses one. In the end, we perceive Grand Hotel not so much as a coherent movie, than as a series of extended vignettes, each tuned to the various actors’ talents, none of them quite cohering.

     We’d see this style of filmmaking soon after in Dinner at Eight and in the dozens of star-leaden but mediocre hotel, airport, and disaster films of the 1960s and 1970s (Airport, The Towering Inferno, etc.), as well as the satires of the same genre such as Airplane!

      But then Grand Hotel was one of the first and finest. It won as Oscar for the Best Film of 1932 (without garnering a single other nomination), and has been enshrined in The National Registry. So why complain? 

    As the TV broadcaster of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment puts it, “sit back and relax as we now present Grand Hotel.” The only trouble, Jack Lemmon finds, is that the movie, given all the ads surrounding it, will not be broadcast during the meal he hopes to eat while watching it. Somewhere, there’s a kind of metaphor in that fact: the grand banquet the movie seems to offer up doesn’t quite ever get delivered, and we’re left—despite our expectations—still a bit hungry.

      Given the fact that several queer theorists and LGBTQ critics had mentioned this film as having a number of gay figures, I too was disappointed to discover them only in the figure of Grusinskaya’s assistant Pimenov (Ferdinand Gottschalk)—a neurotic, slightly "flitty" man who calls her "Glu," who Richard Barrios describes as "one of cinema's first evidently gay courtiers to a showbiz diva" who later that year played a somewhat similar role in Cecille B. DeMille's far more openly gay The Sign of the Cross—and in a hurried glimpse of two rather tweedy women obviously enjoying one another's copy as they hang out in the great hotel's Yellow Room bar; but they are certainly not dancing together cheek to cheek as Barrios suggests—unless somehow while watching the entire film four times I happened to miss it, which certainly might be possible given the fact that I wrote this review in 2017, having missed any of the so-called "gay" action I recount in these last eight paragraphs. Indeed, the bar scene is hardly worth mentioning and one might wonder, accordingly, why it even matters except for the fact that Goulding put it in the movie and saw to it that it stayed there despite a thousand other cuts.

 

     Evidently during the early 1930s "pansy craze" it simply was unthinkable that gay or lesbian figures would not somehow be represented. As Pare Lorenz wrote in Vanity Fair in June 1933, as quoted in Barrios' Screened Out:

 

"An educated foreigner, strange to the land, might well conclude from the general moral precepts of ordinary movies that the country at large was engaging in a final orgiastic, razzle-dazzle dash to the devil. He might convince himself if he looked over the record and discovered that only five years ago hundreds of legal and official censors, under the watchful eye of chief wowser, Will Hays, made it almost impossible for a director to handle a manuscript dealing with any of the everyday faces of life.

     Currently, our foreigner would find...pictures especially created for ladies who admittedly prefer pants to petticoats and he would find in almost every movie comedy some allusion to homosexuality.

     Oddly enough, he would also find that even though the censors allow such things, the public cares so little about these antics it consistently stays away from the theatres."

 

      Yet movie-going audiences, it appears, were very interested in these phantom sightings. As Barrios reports, at the opening of Grand Hotel at Grauman's Chinese Theater on April 29, 1932 the police department honed in—among the audience of noted celebrities that included the likes of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable—on "a strikingly gowned woman and her tuxedoed escort," detaining them as they left the theater and arresting them soon after. That beauty in a gown, apparently, was no woman, and it was illegal to appear in drag in public if not connected with an onstage performance. Perhaps the movies were not so much “losing” customers as simply drawing in a more diverse audience than Lorenz might have imagined.

     

Los Angeles, May 5, 2017

Los Angeles, April 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).