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: Ninotchka

Ninotchka (1939)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch

This was our introduction to the great Greta Garbo.  She makes a great stone-faced government worker from the Soviet Union in this film set in Paris before the war.

The movie trades on the glamour of Paris against the cold reality of the Soviet Union.  In the end, though, it's only love that matters for the principals.  The movie is especially interesting as a historical artifact, but entertaining enough in its own right.