Greta Garbo's Movies Get the TV Guide Treatment: "Grand Hotel"

 

 This post is part of an ongoing series on Greta Garbo's films. I began with a look at the sources behind the stories of each film, and currently I am doing short summaries of the films, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, a bit in the way that TV Guide used to summarize "King Kong" as "Giant ape esacapes, grabs blonde, climbs tall building." If you would like to go to the beginning of the Garbo film series of posts, just click here.

"Grand Hotel" isn't, in my opinion, Garbo's best movie but it may be my favorite film with Greta Garbo in it. In the early 1930s, Hollwyood was all glamor, big spending, a constantly cranking pulbicity machine and movie stars. Even with all that competition, "Grand Hotel" got Best Picture at the Acamedy Awards, but no actiung awards for any of the cast. Puzzling, as what a cast it was!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jean Hersholt (above), the last of the actors to be featured in the oepning of "Grand Hotel,"would go on to his most memorable film role, wearing a snowy-white Santa Claus beard, as the grandfather in "Heidi."

 

Character actress Rafaela Ottiano, who plays Suzette, the maid to Garbo's character Grusinkaya,  didn't make the introductory lineup, as you can see from this clip.

 

 

Just as Jean Hersholt is best-known, other than his role in "Grand Hotel," for his role in a Shirley Temple movie ("Heidi"), Rafaela Ottiano's second-most memorable role was also in a film starring Temple when she was a very young child actress. In this still from "Curly Top." Ottiano is the highly-strung headmistriss of a school chiding the kindly housemother for not being ready for a visit by an important official. 

And here she is, making poor Shirley Temple come into her office just because the girl put a pony in the bed next to hers in the girls' dorm. 

In "Grand Hotel," Ottiano is  perfect as Suzette (below, at reight), who is very proper and old-school European. She is a wonderful mixture of maid, companion, nurse, and therapist for the ballerina Grusinskaya. Recently, I was charmed to read online that in a Broadway revival of "Grand Hotel," the character name for the maid was changed from Suzette to Rafaela in honor of the film actress who never got her due for the film.

"Grand Hotel," when it was released in 1932, impressed both critics and the public. The film beat out "Shanghai Express," starring Marlene Dietrich, for the Oscar, but the latter film sold more movie tickets that "Grand Hotel." Still, as you can see from this press photo below, plenty of movie-goers wanted to see MGM's biggest stars in one motion picture.

 

"Grand Hotel" may have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but film critics -- both then and now -- have felt that awards would have been appropriate for at least some of the acting talent, as well as for Blanche Sewell for editing and for William Daniels for cinematography. There are a lot of cool visual effects, like prismatic spins and overlapping kaleidoscope images of smiulatneous events, which in this computer age is nothing but in 1932, the technical parts of that were really challenging. The editing is tight and the film never drags.  Personally I think the editing and cinematography, plus the Art Deco design of the hotel set, makes a visually stunning film.

Now for a little about the movie's biggest star: For decades, people have done Greta Garbo imitations by saying "I vahnt to be alonnnne" in an exotic, imperious way.

 

 

 in "Grand Hotel," Garbo says her most famous line in the voice of an aging dancing star who is developing a it like stage fright  or PTSD. When she says that she wants to be alone, she says it in a voice that's sad, worried, and a little out-of-it. She's not a worldly slim European looking down on people less gorgeous than herself; rather, she has her tulle dancing skirt gathered up in her arms, and she leans against the wall like the "little soldier" she remembers being as a child in the strict dancing school which molded her into a stage success. 

Here's a chance to hear Garbo's most famous line of dialogue for yourself:

 

 

 This week I will skip the plot summary, or rather summaries. "Grand Hotel" follows the lives of several sets of characters, and you really have to see the film to make sense of the overlapping storylines. 

 One of the best things about "Grand Hotel" is the depth of the characters. Of course, the studio  bringing out its best talent really helped, but the dapatation could have trimmed away the stories of all the guests at the Grand Hotel. Instead, we get into each character's life story, and there is a very satisfactory ending to the movie, with the characters checking out of their rooms and members of the hotel staff telling us, the audience, where characters are going and how their lives have changed.

 

 

Note: "Grand Hotel" is based on a novel by a German author, Vicki Baum. The book 's title is Menchen Im Hotel. Though it literally means "Men in a Hotel," this was the age of the mascline standing in for all humans, so the English title of Baum's book is "People in a Hotel." Hollywood changed this to "Grand Hotel" for a little marquee drama.

 

As the studio did with "Anna Christie," MGM released a German-language version of "Grand Hotel." It's fun to hear the telephone operators at the hotel switchboard speaking as novelist Baum imagined them.

Image sources: 

The hand-kissing still came from this site.   One of the ircular balconies image can be found  here.  Other images I used today were fvound at this blog

 

 

Next week: More Greta Garbo movies

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