Grand Hotel

Casting five of MGM’s biggest stars in one picture was a gamble that paid off for producer Irving Thalberg. But Grand Hotel has much more than its luminous residents to recommend it; the film is a masterpiece of evocative set design and art direction. Director Edmund Goulding creates an atmosphere at once intensely realistic and allegorical. Based on a successful novel and play by Vicki Baum, the claustrophobic picture of European grandeur in its last, pre-Fascist gasps is only enhanced by the choice of actors: Greta Garbo as a world-weary prima donna; Joan Crawford, whose performance as a sensuous stenographer with a cold eye on Wallace Beery’s pocketbook won her more kudos than Garbo, and was a turning point in her career; Lionel Barrymore as a bookkeeper exploring the potentials of his terminal illness; and John Barrymore as a roguish baron who lightens Garbo’s load for a brief moment. Love, greed, death, cynicism—not in that order, but intermingling freely within the rooms of the Grand Hotel, Berlin.