Dinner at Eight (1933)

My Review

“Dinner at Eight” is a pre-Code comedy-drama about a wealthy New York socialite planning an extravagant dinner party unaware of her husband’s failing health and major financial problems of some of her guests. Director George Cukor put together an engrossing chitty-chatty drama which holds the audience’s interest for the 113 minute running time. The excellent screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Donald Ogden Stewart was based on the 1932 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber.

The cast includes Lionel Barrymore and Billie Burke as the host couple, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Jean Hersholt, May Robson, Lee Tracy, Edmund Lowe, Madge Evans, Grant Mitchell, and Herman Bing as the waiter. The watchable “Dinner at Eight” was the tenth highest grossing film of 1933 for producer David O. Selznick and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was filmed at the MGM sound stages in Culver City, California.