The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 1-7
Grand Hotel (1932)
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Grand Hotel is the 1932 adaptation of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel, a bestseller (soon to be reissued by NYRB). The movie did well, too—it won Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards, largely for the work done by a cast of MGM stars, including John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and John’s brother Lionel. Grand Hotel is the granddaddy of the ensemble-cast, linked-short-story film; it shares DNA with noirs and capers; it is spacious enough for a fading, manic-depressive prima ballerina (Garbo), a charmingly broke aristocrat (J. Barrymore), a dying man determined to enjoy his end of days (L. Barrymore), a good-hearted gal on the make (Crawford), an evil tycoon, a hopeless doctor, and an adorable dachshund. There’s love and gambling, drinks and dancing, blackmail and a bludgeoning with a telephone. In a way, the film is a corrective to the weird current vogue for doomed Weimar extravagance—all the characters are counting on a future, though it is in many cases dark, or short. Elina Mishuris (June 7, 7:30pm at Nitehawk; introduced by Noah Isenberg, author of the Introduction of the new NYRB edition of Grand Hotel)