★★★★★
Grand Hotel is a cinematic pleasure. A big part of the enjoyment here comes from the stylish art direction. The film’s interiors draw the eye to their German modernist furnishings, and the camera celebrates this style with its panning and its overhead shots. The fashion here, too, makes us want to oogle, especially the way the women are dressed. The lithesome forms of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford are clad in tight, slimming dresses that flair into shoulder pads or furs at the top. The sleek lines of their hats complement the outfits. And Goulding’s direction evokes inhumanly elegant postures from his women, both as they sit talking and as they walk. Garbo and Crawford move like the languid women from contemporary cartoons in pages of the New Yorker. The affected dialogue adds to the elegance of the hotel, too. “I've never been so tired in my life,” laments Garbo’s world-weary Grusinskaya . And when she talks about retiring from dance, she ponders, “What would I do? Grow orchids? Keep white peacocks? Die!” The affected elegance of Grand Hotel is a pleasure we don’t find in film today.
There’s also an unexpected darkness informing this film. WW I is evident in the background as Baron von Gaigern refers to his wartime experience. At one point, he bitterly observes that he learned how to pray and lie in school and to kill and hide in the war. And Dr. Otternschlag, half his face covered with a black, war-caused scar, always has a pessimistic observation to make about the frothy life of the hotel. “People coming, going. Nothing ever happens” at the hotel, he observes. “And when you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed, that's the end." Death also follows the characters here. The accountant Kringelein is mortally ill and may die at any moment, and the Baron is shot dead just as happiness is within his grasp. The Grand Hotel may be elegant, but it’s shot through with a deep pessimism.
This mood of pessimistic darkness overlain with elegance is one of the most significant elements that Goulding’s Grand Hotel shares with the recent Wes Anderson Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s not hard to feel this fundamental similarity. And Anderson’s Grand Budapest picks up a few other details, too. In Grand Budapest, we learn about horrors of war from Zero just as we hear about the war in Grand Hotel, and Zero’s bellboy training owes some debt to the end of Grand Hotel when a manager inspects the bellboys’ gloves for cleanliness and fit. There’s even some reference to Dr. Otternschlag’s conspicuous facial deformation in the otherwise gratuitous scar on Clotilde’s face in Grand Budapest. Such imperfection is what the world is made of despite all the gestures to style and civility.
Both films also show the era of the 30s as a time of transition. The sporty American couple rolls up in their car at the end of Grand Hotel as a new economic power and set of social conventions arrives, and fascism blooms in the final part of Wes Anderson’s film. Both movies show the period between the wars as a transition from an era of ineffective grace and style to something less elegant and less high-minded, though the hotel of the earlier film is clearly more impervious to history that that of the later movie.
Grand Hotel is wonderful cinema experience. Really, they don't make 'em like this anymore.
