Tuesday, August 23, 2022, 7:30 p.m., Dryden Theatre
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Grand Hotel (1932)
(Edmund Goulding, US 1932, 112 min., 35mm)
“People are coming, going. Nothing ever happens!”
MGM publicity boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” and with Grand Hotel they proved it. At a time when it was customary to have only one or two big stars in a film, producer Irving Thalberg took a chance and cast five early 1930s megastars into a single production. Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore are the guests whose lives intertwine with love, thievery, and bribes while staying at the art deco Grand Hotel in Weimar-era Berlin. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, Grand Hotel is one of the most sophisticated and entertaining movies of the 1930s.