Grand Hotel

Something of an anomaly in that it won an Oscar for Best Picture, even though none of the cast members or the director were nominated for Academy Awards, Edmund Goulding's 1932 classic Grand Hotel serves up an episodic story in which the lives of five guests in Berlin's intrigue-laden Grand Hotel (where "nothing ever happens") intertwine in small slice-of-life encounters that touch on the full spectrum of human nature and behavior (the hotel being a metaphor for the world in microcosm). Heading up the ensemble cast, Wallace Beery (who won an Oscar for Best Actor for 1932's The Champ) is superb as a loudmouthed jerk putting together a business deal; the scenes between jewel thief Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore) and aging ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) are especially touching (this is the film in which Garbo's trademark line "I vant to be alone" is uttered); and Joan Crawford displays the kind of aggressive sex appeal that would disappear from the screen two years later with the institution of Joe Breen's infamous Production Code. Boasting a decent transfer from a reasonably good print, the DVD also features a handful of winning extras: a new 12-minute “making of” featurette, premiere newsreel footage, and the 19-minute parody short “Nothing Ever Happens.” Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)