Edmund Goulding (1932)

In the opening shot, the camera moves across a bank of busy switchboard operators.  The shot introduces a succession of telephone calls made either by or about characters staying in the Grand Hotel in Berlin who will be important in the story.   All human life is supposedly there.  Senf (Jean Hersholt), a porter, is desperate to know from a hospital maternity ward if his wife has given birth yet.  Otto Krengelein (Lionel Barrymore) came to Berlin for a medical opinion on ‘that old trouble of mine’.  The news wasn’t good and Krengelein asks the man he’s calling to destroy his will, having decided, in the short time left to him, to spend his life’s savings staying at the metropolis’s most expensive hotel.   Krengelein is a lowly accountant in a firm owned by the industrialist Preysing (Wallace Beery), who is also staying at the Grand.  He phones home with an anxious update on the precarious international business deal he’s looking to close in Berlin.  Suzette (Rafaela Ottiano), maid to the ballerina Grusinskaya, calls the theatre to explain that her mistress won’t be at rehearsal today – ‘She didn’t sleep all night – there is something preying on her mind’.  The impecunious Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore) furtively reports the progress of a plot in which he’s involved.  His mention of befriending ‘her ballet master’ makes it clear enough who the plot’s target is.

These little monologues – an efficient exposition of the principals’ various predicaments – are cut short by a terse remark, virtually an aside, from permanent resident Dr Otternschlag (Lewis Stone):  ‘Grand Hotel … people coming, going – nothing ever happens’.  The accumulating phone calls amount to an intriguing set-up.  Otternschlag’s deflating observation already seems comically wide of the mark.  It’s no surprise – but no less funny for that – when the doctor repeats the same words at the end of the flamboyantly eventful story.  Lavish, antique melodrama and showcasing of the cast’s big names dominate but the above isn’t the only instance of Edmund Goulding’s film being effective in more surprising and economical ways.  The switchboard operators reappear:  first, as a simple breathing space between episodes; then, more imaginatively, at dead of night.  Nothing’s doing on the switchboard until a call comes through to report a murder in one of the hotel rooms.  Goulding also returns occasionally, at different times of the working day, to the staff on the hotel reception desk.  The Baron’s pet dachshund is sometimes obvious light relief, but not always.  Lying on his slain master’s bed, the dog pricks his ears as the bedside telephone rings unanswered.  (A phone in another room in the hotel has just served as a murder weapon.)  The following morning, as a member of staff pulls him on a lead towards the hotel exit, the dog has to scurry to avoid a broom sweeping clean just behind him.

The stars are the thing, though.  Greta Garbo is the legendary Russian ballerina Grusinskaya and Grand Hotel is the film in which she says (more than once) ‘I want to be alone’.  Now in the twilight of her career, Grusinskaya is fathomlessly world-weary and romantic.  Garbo engages with the preposterous character so passionately that she makes her compelling.  In different registers, the other leading lights follow suit – some more successfully than others.  Lionel Barrymore’s histrionics as Krengelein are inventive and hugely entertaining.  His brother John has a fine doomed suavity as the melancholy Baron, who steals Grusinskaya’s jewellery before returning it when she declares her love for him.  The magnate Preysing’s business negotiations are a relatively less colourful part of the plot and Wallace Beery’s unvarying performance makes matters worse.  The Baron is killed by Preysing in a fit of rage:  the way Beery plays him, bludgeoning is an all too apt cause of death (it’s a relief when he’s carted off by the police).  This one-note cartoon German comes complete with mittel-European accent – which the Barrymores and Joan Crawford, as the gold-digging stenographer Flaemmchen, don’t attempt.   Crawford’s reactions tend to arrive before completion of others’ lines meant to provoke them but she’s remarkably vivid and free-moving – very different from the stiff, oppressively magnetic actress she later became.  Sequences are often extended purely to display the talent and charisma of the effulgent leading players:  a fervent heart-to-heart between Garbo and John Barrymore; a drunk solo scene for his brother; a high-stakes card game starring both the Barrymores.

The source material is a 1929 novel, Menschen im Hotel, by the Austrian Vicki Baum.  William A Drake, who adapted Baum’s novel for the stage in 1930, also did the film’s screenplay.  The over-the-top characters and plot twists don’t disguise the fact that Drake’s screenplay is a very competent construction job.    All that happens[1] points to a larger metaphorical meaning, hinted at heavily in another aperçu from the disfigured Great War veteran Dr Otternschlag.  Unlike his opening and parting shots, this one is meant to be incisive:  ‘When you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed … that’s the end’.  The film’s finale sees the surviving guests check out as new arrivals check in (and Senf receives the long-awaited good news that he’s a father:  mother and baby doing fine).   Grusinskaya, unaware of the Baron’s fate though morbidly suspicious that something is wrong, is hurried off by her retinue to catch a transcontinental train.  Krengelein, financial circumstances transformed by the card game, and Flaemmchen join forces and head to France in search of a cure for his medical condition.   Their destination, says Krengelein, is ‘the Grand Hotel Paris’.  His new companion asks how he knows there is a Grand Hotel there.  He assures her ‘there are Grand Hotels everywhere in the world’.

 4 August 2018

[1]  More plot details at, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hotel_(1932_film).