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.
