This Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a sweeping soap opera about the guests at the Grand Hotel. Several plots intertwine, but mostly it's about Stars! Stars! Stars! Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and both Barrymore brothers head up the cast. Garbo is luminous as Grusinskaya, the neurotic and famous-but-slipping dancer and, yes, she "vonts to be alone." John Barrymore is a cat burglar with blue blood and a heart of gold, and Lionel Barrymore happily caroms off him as Mr. Kringelein, a dying man who wants to live out the time he has left with the rich. Joan Crawford is perhaps the biggest surprise of the movie: as Flaemmchen, a young career girl trying to decide between secretary and tart, she is uncharacteristically funny, vivacious, and downright bubbly. Along the way we discover that money, fame, and titles don't guarantee happiness, and being a jewel thief doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. The nicest touch is the hint that other, minor plots swirl around the edges of the film, suggesting that we've only seen a small chapter of the hotel's story.

Grand Hotel: Vicki Baum's novel and play of plush Berlin hotel where ``nothing ever happens. '' Stars prove the contrary: Garbo as lonely ballerina, John B. her jewel-thief lover, Lionel B. a dying man, Crawford an ambitious stenographer, Beery a hardened businessman, Stone the observer. Scripted by William A. Drake. Best Picture Oscar winner; a must. Plot reworked many times (in HOTEL BERLIN, WEEKEND AT THE WALDORF, etc. ). Later a Broadway musical

The Best Picture of 1932 established the episodic narrative device of following the diverse stories of various characters who drift through a location. It was to be repeated onboard ships, trains and planes, in apartment buildings, resorts, anywhere the camera could observe comings and goings and the drama inherent in everyday life. Garbo stands out in an outstanding crowd of the screen's great faces as a world-weary ballerina pining for her jewel thief lover (John Barrymore). Other stories...

Even today this mult-star blockbuster film crackles with wit, temperament and vitality all stemming from the cream of MGM's then-finest talent. Joan Crawford is very vivacious and appealing here, and her acting style is very different from the rather wooden zombie we saw in the forties and fifties. Barrymore and Garbo do well in their roles and Wallace Beery is impressive as the German Preysing. To get an idea of just how much times have changed, Crawford's fee for her playing of Flaemmchen was a mere $60,000!

This is one of the greatest films there is. With all of those great early films stars how could it not be!!! In this hotel where "nothing ever happens" a lonely dancer falls in love with a jewel thief who is later killed by a ruthless business man who wants to get his secretary in the sack and the jewel theif just needs some money but he can't get it from the sick but wealthy worker who is staying there too. That is just some of what this great movie has to offer. It has one of the greatest acting ensembles ever put together. It is hard to beat this one. Get it NOW!!!!!!

Berlin's plushest, most expensive hotel is the setting where in the words of Dr. Otternschlag "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.". The doctor is usually drunk so he missed the fact that Baron von Geigern is broke and trying to steal eccentric dancer Grusinskaya's pearls. He ends up stealing her heart instead. Powerful German businessman Preysing brow beats Kringelein, one of his company's lowly bookkeepers but it is the terminally ill Kringelein who holds all the cards in the end. Meanwhile, the Baron also steals the heart of Preysing's mistress, Flaemmchen, but she doesn't end up with either one of them in the end...

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