Movie Notes: Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel (1932)
Director: Edmond Goulding

This is another Best Picture winner from days-gone-by, but this is one that deserves it.  It's hard to believe this was only a year younger than Cimarron, as it is about a hundred times fresher.

The conceit is that a network of loosely connected characters in Berlin's Grand Hotel are going about life.  Each has a distinct character arc, but their lives have unexpected impacts on each other.  People are concerned about money, honesty, sex, love, security, and death.  The hotel is an obvious proxy for life, and the film is an exploration of the fragile quality of that gift, and what we should do with it.

While the answers are perhaps unsatisfactory, the film manages to be quite entertaining despite that, and in the face of its solemnity.  The movie balances humor, sentiment, and tragedy quite well.  John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, and Greta Garbo are all fantastic at their roles, and keep the movie chugging along with a mix of glamor, gravitas, and light-hearted fun.

Movie Notes: Cimarron

Cimarron (1931)
Director: Wesley Ruggles

At some point in the distant past, I put most of the best picture winning movies from the past onto our Netflix queue.  Some were, of course, not available, but Cimarron was one of the earliest available that we hadn't seen.

It hasn't aged well.  It's incredibly overwrought for a talkie.  Richard Dix acts as if it was theater or a silent film, and simply annoys.  Also, he's a jerk.  Irene Dunne is OK, except that she hasn't much personality.  Plus, her husband leaves her without a word of explanation for years a couple of times in order to have adventures, and she accepts him back willingly and without so much as a discussion of his obvious deeply held problems.

It's racist in the normal old Hollywood way, with a badly stereotyped black boy, but we have to balance that against the fact that it was far ahead of its time in its dealing with Native American troubles.

We really didn't enjoy it.