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The MGM palazzo, scratch the Art Deco surface and find as much grimy desperation as a Warner Bros. gold-diggers musical. Edmund Goulding begins with an overhead traveling shot of busy switchboard operators, a perspective later repeated as a view from a balcony to give the checkerboard-tiled circles of the Berlin Great Hotel's lobby. "A hundred doors leading to one hall" is the metaphor favored by the disfigured doctor (Lewis Stone), half a dozen or so subplots pass through to accommodate the studio's constellation of personalities. The strapped baron (John Barrymore) is something of a Raffles, his target is a string of pearls belonging to the ballerina (Greta Garbo), a weary swan facing half-empty theaters: "It's not stage fright. It's something more." Interrupted burglary turns into romantic interlude, their spiritual ardor contrasted with the carnal transactionalism of the industrialist angling for a merger (Wallace Beery) and the stenographer willing to take dictation (Joan Crawford). Stumbling in and out of the spotlight is the dying bookkeeper on a last hurrah (Lionel Barrymore), "my own master for the first time in my life." Quite the ritzy package, strictly aimed at showcasing star wattage yet sculptured with deft long takes and streaked with continental irony. Garbo divides her pirouette into doleful and euphoric halves, between them is a glimpse of the danseuse sprawled on the floor in her tutu kissing her doffed slippers, a lost Degas glimpsed from inside a closet. The Barrymores embody a split of their own, John saves his most soulful smooch for a dachshund while Lionel engulfs the opulent scenery with a pantomime of sloshed gratification. Alive to the Depression unease behind every wisecrack and unfazed by the terror of Beery in a towel, Crawford practically walks off with the picture. "Goodbye, funny one." Cukor polishes the template in Dinner at Eight, Altman stretches it to bursting in Nashville. With Jean Hersholt, Rafaela Ottiano, Tully Marshall, and Ferdinand Gottschalk. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |