Looking at the cast of Grand Hotel, it's easy to forget just how large a confluence of star power the movie brought together. Grand Hotel straddled the end of the Silent era and the birth of sound and because of this, many people today are not familiar with just how popular the cast members were individually. Much of their hay was made in silent movies and as a result of this, modern audiences are unfamiliar with their popularity. Greta Garbo was arguably the biggest star in Hollywood at the time, while brothers Lionel and John Barrymore were both critical and popular successes, including Lionel winning the Academy Award for Best Actor the year before (A Free Soul). Today, Joan Crawford is better known for her later movies, but her star burned the brightest in the early 30s. Even Wallace Beery, a relative afterthought now, was a big star who had billing over Clark Gable earlier that year, and had won Best Actor for The Champ in 1931. All of this is to say that Grand Hotel was, to that point, the biggest collection of stardom in movie history. Grand Hotel uses the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin to unfold the encounters of several, previously unacquainted. Each character arrives at the hotel at a different point in their life, John Barrymore is a bankrupt Baron who supplements his income with an occasional jewel theft. Lionel plays an accountant who has recently discovered he is dying and befriends the Baron, who plans on stealing a the jewels of a burned out ballerina (Garbo). Beery plays an industrialist, who hires Crawford to be his stenographer. Each comes to the hotel unaware of each other, but by the end of the movie each is intertwined in the lives of one another. The great joy of Grand Hotel, along with watching great actors on the screen together, is seeing how each life is affected by the other through the kind of random encounters you can have on a daily basis.
29. My Man Godfrey (1936)
Sandwiched between the affluent "Roaring Twenties" and World War II, America in the 1930s were a distinct period of culture. The Great Depression had a profound affect on the movies of the 30s especially, with no movie being a better example of this than My Man Godfrey. Not only is it a screwball comedy, the genre that defined the decade in an attempt to provide lighthearted entertainment to masses, but it also highlighted the big class differences of the decade. Based on the short story "1011 Fifth" by Eric Hatch, My Man Godfrey stars William Powell as Godfrey Smith, a penniless man living in the New York City dump. His fortunes change when he is taken, as part of a scavenger hunt looking for a "forgotten man," to a party of the wealthy by socialite Irene Bullock (Carol Lombard). Bullock takes a fancy to Godfrey, a sentiment that is only added to by the way he irks her older sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick). Irene employs Godfrey as the new family butler, where he must deal with Cornelia's attempts to get him fired, as well that the eccentric antics of the rest of the Bullock family, including the frustrated patriarch, (Eugene Pallette), his nutty wife Angelica (Alice Brady), and her preening protege Carlo (Mischa Auer). Another hurdle for Godfrey is that Irene has seemingly fallen in love with him, and idea that makes him uncomfortable. Through it all, despite his lowly state at the beginning of the movie, he keeps his dignity and respect, sending a clear message that being poor isn't a disgrace, a notion that would certainly appeal to the masses that would have seen it. My Man Godfrey provides plenty of the laughs and escapism for the poor, struggling lower class people who populated the movie halls during the Great Depression, but what it also provides a little bit of hope as well. Why not, like Godfrey a man who lost his life to the Depression, couldn't any one of the unfortunate souls out in the audience also be picked out of the squalor and taken into the rich, extravagant life of the upper class? Something to dream about at least.
One of the defining aspects of the 1930s were the "screen teams," from musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, to The Thin Man series with Myrna Loy and William Powell, and the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, the 1930s were rife with movie pairs. One of the most enduring of these duos are Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, who over the course of six years produced eight different pictures, mostly of the adventure variety, with Flynn playing the dashing hero and de Havilland his love interest. The first of these movies, the one that introduced the two to the world, was Captain Blood. Flynn plays the titular role as the Dr. Peter Blood, who is sold into slavery in the West Indies, as a punishment for treason. He is convicted because he treated a wounded leader of the failed Monmouth rebellion. While in the Indies, he is mistreated and abused, but eventually escapes, but not after earning the affection of his owner's daughter Arabella (de Havilland). Blood, along with many of his fellow slaves, take to a life of piracy and do battle with both British and private forces, including the villainous Captain Levasseur, who double-crosses Blood and his crew. Both Flynn and de Havilland were appearing in a starring role for the first time, with Flynn only being a bit player up until this point. The chemistry between the two is apparent from the start, and it is what drives many of the lesser movies the two made. In Captain Blood however, it is more than just a vehicle for the two, with tremendous sword fights and sea battles directed by a master of the genre, Michael Curtiz, as well as terrific acting by the supporting players, particularly Rathbone. Captain Blood is not only a great adventure movie, but it sparked a return to the adventure movies of the early 1920s with Flynn as the heir-apparent to Douglas Fairbanks.
Alfred Hitchcock is best known for his movies in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s but between The Man Who Knew Too Much, Young and Innocent, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes, he produced a decade of movies that any director would be jealous of. All of Hitchcock's films in the 1930s and earlier were made in England and have a very different tone and style than his later work. The Man Who Knew Too Much, which would later be remade by Hitchcock himself in 1956, has the kind of intrigue you'd expect from one of his movies, but it is a little bit darker in tone than his later work, yet also with a kind of British charm that is missing from the remake and other later Hitchcock films. It tells the story of an English couple (Leslie Bank and Edna Best) trying to find their kidnapped daughter (Nova Pilbeam) while also investigating an planned assassination of an European official. The assassins are led by Abbott, played by Peter Lorre in his first English language film. Lorre, already an accomplished actor in Germany, gives a tremendous performance, at first appearing as a charming foreigner but eventually morphing into the conniving and vicious criminal. The fact that Lorre wasn't yet fluent in English only adds to the effect. The tension and suspense created during attempted assassination at the Royal Albert Hall rivals any of the big set-piece moments in later Hitchcock films, but the movie doesn't peak there. The aftermath of the failed assassination attempt leads into a dramatic standoff and shootout in the London docks. The 1930s were an important time for Alfred Hitchcock, who was going from the "gifted amateur" he described himself as at this time, to one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. It's is not a coincidence that this shift coincided with the advent of sound in movies, which gave Hitchcock more tools to create his patented suspense with.
No director was more synonymous with the 1930s than Frank Capra. During the decade, he had three movies finish in the top 5 highest grossing for their years, five times he was nominated for Best Director, winning three, while six of his movies were nominated for Best Picture, with two winning. Sufficed to say that Capra was the premier director of the 30s. You Can't Take It With You was his biggest hit of the decade, topping the box office in 1938 as well as winning Best Picture and Best Director for Capra. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it is a typical charming Capra romantic comedy that he became famous for. Obviously the base script, adapted for the screen by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin, is fantastic and only enhanced by an all-star cast of James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, Edward Arnold, and a young Ann Miller. Stewart plays Tony, the son of a wealthy banker, Anthony Kirby (Arnold) who falls in love with Alice Sycamore (Arthur), who is part a large family that is just as poor as it is eccentric. The class differences between the Kirby's and the Sycamore's make up the bulk of the humor as the two vastly dissimilar families interact. Barrymore plays the patriarch of the family, Grandpa Martin, while the rest of the supporting cast is filled out with a multitude of eccentric and amusing ancillary characters, another staple of Capra and the screwball comedy genre in general. Capra was a master of pacing, often cutting his films in a way that enhanced both the appeal and the humor of the scene, particularly using timed reaction shots, because he understood the charm of the human face as well as any director in history.
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