Grand Hotel (1932)

My Review

The Best Picture of 1931-1932 is…..”Grand Hotel.” This black-and-white melodrama was the first major all-star ensemble film. The story is set over two days in a luxury Berlin hotel following five intertwined lives, well directed by Edmund Goulding. The excellent screenplay by William A. Drake was adapted from the 1929 novel of the same name by Vicki Baum.

The cast includes Greta Garbo as a dancer, John Barrymore as a baron, Joan Crawford as a stenographer, Wallace Beery as a ruthless industrialist, Lionel Barrymore as a terminally ill accountant, Lewis Stone as the hotel doctor, and Jean Hersholt as the porter. Cinematographer William H. Daniels zoomed his cameras in for some remarkable closeups of Garbo and Crawford. Since this was a pre-Code film, there are some very risque scenes on display.

The very watchable “Grand Hotel” was the fifth highest grossing film of 1932 for producer Irving Thalberg and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. To date, this is the only movie to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture without being nominated in any other category. It was filmed at the MGM lot in Culver City. Greta Garbo uttered one of the most famous movie lines ever here – “I want to be alone. I just want to be alone.”