5. 1931/32 Grand Hotel

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Outstanding Production - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Nominations:

• Won in every nominated category

Best Picture Contenders:

• Arrowsmith
• Bad Girl
• The Champ
• Five Star Final
• An Hour With You
• Shanghai Express
• The Smiling Lieutenant

Runtime: 112 min.

"Grand Hotel, always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens." These words open this movie about Berlin's Grand Hotel, and the guests who reside there, and a great deal happens there. Some peculiar guests appear to be staying in the hotel, and their faiths ultimately become interconnected.

There is the unfortunate terminally ill mister Kringelein, who has come to the Grand Hotel with all the money he has in the world to live his last three weeks like a king, but finds himself not being treated as such, especially by his boss General Director Preising, who happens to be residing at the same hotel. Preysing tries to negotiate a merger, but faces bad luck in business. He uses a stenographer, Flaemmchen, for his dictations, but she winds up falling in love with Baron Von Geigern, a once wealthy but now bankrupt man trying to win back his fortune in gambling, and getting his betting money through hotel theft. He quickly becomes friends with Kringelein, and after trying to rob her falls in love with Grusinskaya, a mentally unstable ballet dancer.

As you see, the story seems quite difficult to follow, but it is a nice example of a so-called portmanteau film (such as 2005's Crash, but that's getting ahead of our list), where several stories are presented that are seemingly unrelated, but together do form a larger, complete picture. It is considered to be one of the first movies of this kind.

It is also historically renowned for being one of the first movies to use a so-called All-Star cast. This is an excellent time for a bit of moviemaking history. There was a time when a couple of studios, known as the Majors, held a near-monopoly on all three branches of the movie industry: production, distribution and exploitation. They were also trying to hold innovation back in a way that they thought would profit them, and one of the elements the Majors opposed (something a group of renegade Independent Studios such as Fox, Paramount, MGM and others wanted to introduce) was the Star System. This meant using stars that people loved (such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.) to promote a movie, which is how we still know it today (seen that new George Clooney flic?). The Majors opposed it because they thought they would have to pay the stars too much, but the system worked, and the Independents won Hollywood, and still reign it to this day. The Star System is one of the things that made Hollywood great, and for it to work they even plundered Europe of its greatest stars.

And now we're back at Grand Hotel. This movie took the Star System just one step further, and it used stars for almost all the speaking parts. It has Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and many of its day's greatest stars. People flocked to it in masses, and it was a great succes.

It's one of those movies that stood the test of time relatively well. The way the stories are weaved together is very well done, the acting is of course top notch, and there is some very nice cinematography in there as well. Funny trivia though, it is to this day the only film ever to win the OBP without being nominated in a single other category.