The Grand Hotel

The film opens and closes with Lewis Stone’s totally unaware statement : “Grand Hotel. People come and go. Nothing ever happens”. The comment turns out to be ironic during the few days in which the plot unfolds, because everything seems to be happening at the hotel, from romance to robbery to an accidental death.

This Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a sweeping soap opera about the guests at the Grand Hotel. Several plots intertwine, but mostly it’s about Stars! Stars! Stars! Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and both Barrymore brothers head up the cast. Garbo is luminous as Grusinskaya, the neurotic and famous-but-slipping dancer and, yes, she “vonts to be alone.” John Barrymore is a cat burglar with blue blood and a heart of gold, and Lionel Barrymore happily caroms off him as Mr. Kringelein, a dying man who wants to live out the time he has left with the rich. Joan Crawford is perhaps the biggest surprise of the movie: as Flaemmchen, a young career girl trying to decide between secretary and tart, she is uncharacteristically funny, vivacious, and downright bubbly. Along the way we discover that money, fame, and titles don’t guarantee happiness, and being a jewel thief doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. The nicest touch is the hint that other, minor plots swirl around the edges of the film, suggesting that we’ve only seen a small chapter of the hotel’s story. Grand Hotel is a great deal of fun and an excellent chance to see some famous faces in their prime.

Grand Hotel won the Best Picture Oscar. It is the only film to have won the Award without winning any others and without being nominated in any other categories. The award was presented to Irving Thalberg, with no mention of Paul Bern. In addition, Garbo’s line “I want to be alone” was #30 in the list of AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes.

"First Lady of the American Theater"

Helen Hayes was one of the greatest stage actresses of all time, and as movies became more and more prevelant, Helen was able to transform herself into one of the greatest film stars of all time as well. She began a stage career at an early age. By the age of ten, she had made a short film called Jean and the Calico Doll, but only moved to Hollywood when her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, signed a Hollywood deal.

Her sound film debut was The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She followed that with starring roles in Arrowsmith (with Myrna Loy), A Farewell to Arms (with actor Gary Cooper whom Hayes admitted to finding extremely attractive), The White Sister, What Every Woman Knows (a reprise from her Broadway hit), and Vanessa: Her Love Story. However, she never became a fan favorite and Hayes did not prefer film to the stage.

Hayes and MacArthur eventually returned to Broadway. She returned to Hollywood in the 1950s, and her film star began to rise. She starred in My Son John (1952) and Anastasia (1956), and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as an elderly stowaway in the disaster film Airport (1970). She followed that up with several roles in Disney films such as Herbie Rides Again, One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing and Candleshoe. Anastasia was considered a comeback having not acted for several years due to her daughter, Mary’s death and her husband’s failing health. Hayes died on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1993 from congestive heart failure, aged 92, not long after the death of her friend Lillian Gish, with whom she had been friends for many decades. Gish made Hayes the beneficiary of her estate, but Hayes only survived her by a month. Hayes was interred in the Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, New York.

1932 Best Actor Tie

Wallace Beery is mostly identified with the character of Richard, the Lion-Heartcd, which he played in “Robin Hood” and also in a picture of the same name. He is a brother of Noah was also a great character actor in the 30’s & 40’s. Wallace was the first husband of Gloria Swanson.

But what I remember Beery for was his portrayal in the 1931 film, The Champ. I watched this film a few weeks after I had saw the re-make with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroeder. I must say the original was much better. Beery was a powerful presence on the screen, and he made you feel his pain and passion.

Beery plays the alcoholic father, ex-heavyweight champion Andy “Champ” Purcell and despite his frequent binges, his frequent gambling and their squalid living conditions his son, Dink (Jackie Cooper) still adores his father and would do anything for him. Enter the long lost mother, who is now married and has money. Dink goes to live with his mother, but misses his father immensely. Andy, wanting to prove his worth to his son enters one more time in a boxing match.

Directed by one of the best director of the day, King Vidor was beautifully shot, and the intimate closing scenes were by far some of the best directing and acting on screen. Wallace Beery went on that year to tie for the Best Acting Oscar with Fredrick March and Frances Marion won a writing Oscar.

After watching this film, anytime I would see an old Wallace Beery film on TV I would have to sit down and watch it. He was one of the great under-rated actors of his time.

Fredric March;

Born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel, Fredric March was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actor. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, he attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother’s maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.

March won an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore. He tied for the Oscar for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and again in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. In 1954, March hosted the 26th Annual Academy Awards.

March was one of the few actors to resist signing long-term contracts with the studios, and was able to freelance and pick and choose his roles, in the process also avoiding typecasting. By this time, he was working on Broadway as often as in Hollywood, and his screen career was not as prolific as it had been.

March, however, won two Best Actor Tony Awards: in 1947 for the play Years Ago, written by Ruth Gordon; and in 1957 for a Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. A friend of playwright Arthur Miller, he was favored by the writer to inaugurate the part of Willy Loman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949). Director Elia Kazan cast Lee J. Cobb, however, as Willy Loman, and Arthur Kennedy as his son Biff Loman, two men that the director had worked with in the film Boomerang! (1947). March later played Willy Loman in Columbia Pictures’s 1951 film version of the play, directed by Laslo Benedek. Perhaps March’s greatest late-in-life role was in Inherit the Wind (1960), opposite Spencer Tracy.

When March underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1972, it seemed his career was over, yet he managed to give one last great performance in The Iceman Cometh (1973), as the complicated Irish bartender, Harry Hope. Ironically, co-star Robert Ryan was entering the final stages of lung cancer, so the film was the last for both March and Ryan.

Fredric March died in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 77 from cancer. He was married to actress Florence Eldridge from 1927 until his death; they had 2 adopted children.

Throughout his life, he and his wife were supporters of the Democratic Party and liberal political causes. His support for the Republican (Second Spanish Republic) side during the Spanish Civil War was particularly controversial.