Garbo got me into the building, but she’s not the reason
I stayed. Her tired Russian ballerina falls for the same kind of man she would fall for as a humorless Russian revolutionary in Ninotchka. Can I help it if I found the revolutionary more enchanting?
Fortunately, the ballerina’s story is just one of many that weave through this picture. That man she falls for, a dissolute aristocrat (John Barrymore), also flirts with the stenographer (Joan Crawford) who was hired by the swindling businessman (Wallace Beery) to take dictation and possibly provide other services . . . There’s also a wounded veteran of World War I (Lewis Stone) and a little bookkeeper (Lionel Barrymore), who recently received a terminal diagnosis and has determined to spend his final days in style. John Barrymore may have had the looks in the family, but Lionel’s quiet charm won me over.
Such goings on, before the Hayes Code went into effect! The ballerina and the aristocrat spend the night together. The stenographer contemplates selling her body to the businessman for the price of a few nice outfits and a junket to London. The bookkeeper wins big at poker, helped along by the aristocrat, and goes off to Paris with the stenographer in the hope of finding a cure.
Did Grand Hotel deserve to beat out Shanghai Express for Best Picture in 1932? I wouldn’t say so, but it’s an enjoyable enough romp through Berlin in its heyday.
Deathless Prose 
This is another one that, believe it or not, I haven’t ever gotten around to seeing. I’m a little curious about the film’s background and wonder whether you know much about that. As Wikipedia will tell you, the story began as a novel by an Austrian Jewish woman, Hedwig (Vicki) Baum, who performed as a harpist and studied boxing before taking up writing. The novel was adapted into a play that Max Reinhardt staged in Berlin in 1929, and then someone in Hollywood got wind of it. Not the way American movies get made these days; successful foreign films may get remade (usually unnecessarily, in my experience), but foreign novels?
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I learned somewhere that Irving Thalberg liked Miss Baum’s story so much, he bought the theatrical and film rights for it. He had a knack for picking winners.
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