Grand Hotel

A large hotel in Berlin. Inside are a bookkeeper close to retirement and terminally ill, a baron drowning in debt, a ballerina who senses the end of her career, an industrialist about to lose his business, and a stenographer looking for work. Over a few days all their paths cross. The subject is not the hotel but transience. The line at the end of the film says as much: people come and go and nothing ever happens here. And yet in those few days one life is saved and another ends. The form is built on using a star cast simultaneously; the camera shoots the lobby from above, and the circling floors of corridors present the space like a turning wheel. Greta Garbo's line as the ballerina about wanting to be alone became the most quoted sentence of her career. John Barrymore plays the baron, Joan Crawford the stenographer and Wallace Beery the industrialist, with Lionel Barrymore as the bookkeeper, putting two Barrymores in one film. The production won the Oscar for Best Picture and remains the only film to do so without a nomination in any other category. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood and multi-character narratives. Who it is not for: anyone unused to the acting style of the period; some performances are pitched high by today's measure.