Dinner at Eight (1933)

Social climbing Millicent and Oliver Jordan throw a dinner for a bunch of New York society types, each of whom has much to reveal.

Director:

George Cukor

Writers:

Frances Marion (screenplay), Herman J. Mankiewicz (screenplay),

Stars:

Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Marie Dressler	...	Carlotta Vance
John Barrymore	...	Larry Renault
Wallace Beery	...	Dan Packard
Jean Harlow	...	Kitty Packard
Lionel Barrymore	...	Oliver Jordan
Lee Tracy	...	Max Kane
Edmund Lowe	...	Dr. Wayne Talbot
Billie Burke	...	Millicent Jordan
Madge Evans	...	Paula Jordan
Jean Hersholt	...	Jo Stengel
Karen Morley	...	Mrs. Lucy Talbot
Louise Closser Hale	...	Hattie Loomis
Phillips Holmes	...	Ernest DeGraff
May Robson	...	Mrs. Wendel
Grant Mitchell	...	Ed Loomis

Storyline

Millicent Jordan is pre-occupied with the plans she is making for a high-class dinner party. Her husband Oliver is in failing health, and he is also worried because someone is trying to buy up the stock in his shipping business - even his old friend Carlotta wants to sell her stock. Hoping to get help from businessman Dan Packard, he persuades Millicent, against her wishes, to invite Packard and his wife to the dinner. As Oliver's problems get worse, Millicent is increasingly quick-tempered because the plans for the party are not going smoothly. As the time for the dinner approaches, it appears that the hosts and the guests will all have plenty on their minds.

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Plot Keywords:

dinner | new york | dinner party | blonde | housekeeper | 

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Genres:

Comedy | Drama

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Certificate:

Passed

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

12 January 1934 (USA)

Also Known As:

Jantar às Oito

Filming Locations:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios - 10202 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$435,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

111 min 111 min (Turner library print)

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Herbert Bunston and May Beatty are in studio records/casting call lists as cast members, but they did not appear or were not identifiable in the movie.

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Goofs

In the opening scene, Millicent tells Oliver, "I see your precious Carlotta Vance arrived yesterday on the Europa." Later, that same day during Carlotta's visit to Oliver's office, she says'"I've been in New York four days and I'm lost."

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Quotes

Kitty: I've told you a million times not to talk to me when I'm doing my lashes!

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Connections

Spoofed in Come to Dinner (1934)

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Soundtracks

"I Loved You Then As I Love You Now"
(1927) (uncredited)
(From Our Dancing Daughters)
Music by William Axt and David Mendoza
Played during the opening credits

User Reviews

A starry showcase (and all but grand exit) for consummate scene-stealer Dressler

Among the great actresses who have helped to illuminate the silver screen, Marie Dressler may be Chateau d'Yquem – a grand premier cru, in a class all her own. As aging star of the theatuh Carlotta Vance, a living relic of the 'Delmonico' era in New York, she walks away with an immortal movie, as entertaining a contraption as the studio system ever confected. And she does it effortlessly, despite some very tough competition – the most lustrous talent MGM could summon in the worst year of the Depression, and maybe the best it was ever able to gather together in the many constellations it assembled.

Dressler heads a large ensemble cast, with several distinct but interlocking stories, all leading up to (but never quite making) a posh dinner party at the mansion of Billie Burke, wife of shipping magnate Lionel Barrymore. Desperately trying to snag (the unseen) Lord and Lady Ferncliffe – moldering aristocrats she once met at Cap d'Antibes – Burke bullies and badgers everybody she can think of to seat a swank table. Worrying about nothing so much as how 'dressy' the aspic will be – it's the British Lion molded out of a quivering gelatin – she's oblivious to the human dramas whirling around the people on her guest list.

For starters, her husband is not only seriously ill but close to bankruptcy, to boot. Down in his nautical offices on The Battery, he's paid a visit by an old (and older than he) flame, Dressler; a bit down on her luck herself ('I'm flatter than a pancake – I haven't a sou'), she wants to sell her stock in his company. Another visitor, one of the sharks circling around to feast on his bleeding empire. is Wallace Beery, a loud-mouthed boor whom Barrymore nonetheless cajoles Burke into inviting, against her snobbish sensibilities. Beery, a politically connected wheeler-dealer, has problems of his own, namely his wife Jean Harlow. She lounges luxuriously in bed most of the day, changing in and out of fur-trimmed bed jackets and sampling chocolates while waiting for her doctor-lover (Edmund Lowe) to pay another house call under the pretext of tending to her imaginary ailments.

Burke's and Barrymore's young daughter, meanwhile, conceals a clandestine affair with 'free, white and 45" marquee idol John Barrymore, a washed-up drunk whose grandiose airs can't even fool the bellboys he sends out for bottles of hooch (a storyline in the screenplay, co-written by the also alcoholic Herman J. Mankiewicz – from the George S. Kaufmann/Edna Ferber stage hit – that can't have been comfortable for the similarly afflicted Barrymore, who's even referred to in the movie by his emblematic sobriquet 'The Great Profile').

Those are the major strands of the story, but there's even more talent on board: Louise Closser Hale as Burke's pithy cousin; May Robson as the cook in charge of the ill-starred aspic; Lee Tracy, as John Barrymore's exasperated agent; and, deliciously, Hilda Vaughn as Harlow's mercenary maid.

The goings-on range from the farcical to the tragic, and for the most part, the cast does proud in coping with the often drastic shifts of tone (true, some episodes carry more weight than others, some players less inspired than their colleagues; it's an episodic movie, at times dated, from the infancy of talkies when scenes were not a snappily edited few seconds but prolonged and often stagy).

Still, in this starry cast, Dressler shines brightest. A Canadian gal who started in the circus, she worked in vaudeville, theater, and, in the last few decades of her life, in Hollywood. Despite her girth and the delapidations gravity had worked on her face, she's never less than transfixing. She tosses off the requisite comedy as effortlessly as that oldest of pros that she had become, yet can draw the camera to her deeply kohled eyes when she imparts some very bad news and turn it into a few seconds of threnody. (Only Barbara Stanwyck commands so boundless a range, which we have the luxury of observing over several decades of her career; what survives of Dressler dates only from her few last years.) Dressler would make but one more movie before her death, but it's chivalrous to think of Dinner At Eight as her grand exit.

As Dinner At Eight winds down, the aspic never makes it to table, nor do some of the expected guests. But life plods on, if capriciously and unfairly. Burke, at the end of her tether, utters a plangent cry that sums up man's impotence against the cruelty of fate: 'Crabmeat...CRABMEAT!'