The Grand Hotel Theme as Microcosm

“Grand Hotel . . . People coming, going . . . Nothing ever happens.” –Dr. Otternschlag, Grand Hotel

One of the best films I’ve seen in recent years is an oldie. I first watched Grand Hotel (1932), about the lives of guests and employees at a luxurious hotel in Berlin, when I was on a Greta Garbo kick a couple years ago, but I’ve returned to it since, and I’m always engaged by its microcosmic picture of the world.

The film has given rise to the expression “Grand Hotel theme,” which is used to describe a work of fiction set in a physically limited location--such as a hotel--and following a broad array of characters each going about their lives and sometimes entering into each other’s. The opening scene of Grand Hotel introduces us to many of the characters whose sorrows and joys we will share as the movie progresses:

 

A porter waiting for the birth of this child, a dying man burning through his savings, a ballerina’s maid worrying about her employer . . . 

 

Some of the most important characters are yet to appear: The puffed-up businessman with the pince-nez will hire a young woman named Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) to be his stenographer, and the man plotting a theft will fall in love with the ballerina Grusinskaya (Garbo). Together, they cover many walks of life--rich and poor, master and servant, male and female, healthy and sick, honest and dishonest, happy and sad, alive and dead--bringing all of the world within the walls of the hotel.

The architecture of the hotel itself aids the film’s microcosmic function. The lobby features a circular desk around which hotel guests and porters are a flurry of activity. The checkered pattern of the floor radiates out from the lobby desk to doors, elevators and phone booths. Overhead, the floors of the hotel are stacked in rings lined with guest rooms. The lobby is the physical center of the hotel and the center of the film’s cosmology.

 

One of my favorite characters is Doctor Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face was scarred by an exploding grenade. He now spends his time wandering the lobby, asking the desk clerks if there are any messages for him (There aren’t.), and making dour observations. He has this to say about the hotel:

“What do you do in the Grand Hotel? Eat, sleep, loaf around, flirt a little, dance a little. A hundred doors leading to one hall. No one knows anything about the person next to them. And when you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed. That's the end.”

A fitting summary of life itself, I'd say.

Grand Hotel is microcosmic in genre as well, for it holds many genres within its 112 minutes. While reviewing the DVD for this post, I noticed how the film’s generally light tone masks many dark themes. Greta Garbo’s character alternates between buoyant raptures and deep depression, at one point delivering a melodramatic discourse on death. Later, the dying company man musters his courage to stand up to his big-shot boss, and his boss reacts with palpable contempt. It is to this same scummy but snooty businessman that Joan Crawford tacitly agrees to prostitute herself because she needs money. Underneath the veneer of a breezy romp, Grand Hotel is many things: romance, suspense, human drama, comedy, tragedy, social critique and philosophical reflection.

 

Before I ever heard the phrase “Grand Hotel theme” in English (or had even seen the movie), I had run across it in Japanese:  グランドホテル形式. This literally translates as “Grand Hotel form,” and it is used more generally to refer to films with an ensemble cast. In this as well, Grand Hotel is a world within a world, for its all-star cast reproduces the milieu of Golden-Age Hollywood in miniature. The number of big names on the movie poster would have had the same effect in 1932 that the cast of Ocean’s Thirteen did in 2007 or The Expendables 3 did this year.

Grand Hotel is a little big film.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think classic movies are intrinsically better than movies today, but I do think it’s a shame that while millions in America are familiar with American Hustle, Guardians of the Galaxy or Sharknado, fewer and fewer have seen a Geta Garbo film or even know who Joan Crawford was. I have always been attracted to the black-and-white world of the cinema and television of my grandparents’ day, but even I have only recently begun to explore it in earnest. I’ve missed a lot, but films like Grand Hotel are not to be missed.