Grand Hotel (1932) 7.6
A group of very different individuals staying at a luxurious hotel in Berlin deal with each of their respective dramas. Director:Edmund Goulding |
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Grand Hotel (1932) 7.6
A group of very different individuals staying at a luxurious hotel in Berlin deal with each of their respective dramas. Director:Edmund Goulding |
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| Watch Trailer 0Share... |
| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Greta Garbo | ... | ||
| John Barrymore | ... |
The Baron
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| Joan Crawford | ... | ||
| Wallace Beery | ... |
General Director Preysing
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| Lionel Barrymore | ... | ||
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Lewis Stone | ... |
Doctor Otternschlag
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| Jean Hersholt | ... |
Senf - the Porter
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Robert McWade | ... |
Meierheim
(as Robert Mc Wade)
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Purnell Pratt | ... |
Zinnowitz
(as Purnell B. Pratt)
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Ferdinand Gottschalk | ... |
Pimenov
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Rafaela Ottiano | ... |
Suzette
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Morgan Wallace | ... |
Chauffeur
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Tully Marshall | ... |
Gerstenkorn
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Frank Conroy | ... |
Rohna
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Murray Kinnell | ... |
Schweimann
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Berlin's plushest, most expensive hotel is the setting where in the words of Dr. Otternschlag "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.". The doctor is usually drunk so he missed the fact that Baron von Geigern is broke and trying to steal eccentric dancer Grusinskaya's pearls. He ends up stealing her heart instead. Powerful German businessman Preysing brow beats Kringelein, one of his company's lowly bookkeepers but it is the terminally ill Kringelein who holds all the cards in the end. Meanwhile, the Baron also steals the heart of Preysing's mistress, Flaemmchen, but she doesn't end up with either one of them in the end... Written by Gary Jackson <garyjack5@cogeco.ca>
Setting aside the fact that this is a landmark in the history of Hollywood, it has an unintended effect of foreshadowing the Second World War. GRAND HOTEL, filmed in 1932, is set in a luxury hotel in contemporary Berlin. There are several moments (during scenes with the disfigured doctor in particular) when characters refer to their sacrifices in the First World War. The most pointed remark runs something like "we won battle after battle, only to be told we'd lost the war.") At the time this film was made, Hitler was about a year and a half away from becoming Chancellor. GRAND HOTEL, based on a work by Vicki Baum, who wrote for a German readership, is less a story of the idle rich and the poor who serve them than an observation of the quiet rage stealing over a society whose war wounds only seem to deepen as time passes. Wallace Beery's character, a corrupt industrialist, was, in 1932, a staple of German art and theatre. An American audience in 1932 would merely have seen him as a fat-cat, but, in the Weimar Republic, particularly just before the Nazis took power, such a stereotype was provocative. Watching GRAND HOTEL with a sense of what was about to happen in Germany, one sees not so much a sophisticated soap-opera as a macabre meditation on the genteel side of a very dark phase in history.