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I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie but grossly overrated

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Great movie! A classic. I loved the acting and the way it was filmed.

I cannot watch this movie anymore without hearing those lyrics of the title song from the 1990 Broadway musical. "People come, people go. Where there's life overflowing. Come begin in old Berlin. You're in the Grand Hotel!" The musical allowed the major characters to flow in for dramatic introductions, identified by the embittered partially blind doctor. "Nothing ever happens!", he says dramatically in both the movie and the musical, but you're hearing that from a man going through life with one eye shut. Lewis Stone, so wise as Judge Hardy, fails to convince in character. There's plenty happening in the most opulent hotel in all of 1930's Germany, a shell of itself after a world war, and at a turning point in it's history. Scary for many here, facing their mortality through their immorality.The two immoral characters here are nobleman (and a thief!) John Barrymore and sadistic businessman Wallace Beery. Dying clerk Lionel Barrymore is the most vulnerable, wanting one last fling with life, and finding more than he bargained for. Typist Joan Crawford gets a rare glimpse of heaven on Earth, and finds hell, exploited by Beery and finding supposed romance with John Barrymore. Her friendship with Lionel Barrymore is the one honest relationship in the film, outside of ballerina Greta Garbo and her devoted companion, Rafaela Ottiano. Authors of the musical were so taken by Ottiano that they named the character in the musical after her. Then there's hotel clerk Jean Hersholt, waiting for the news on his wife, in the hospital preparing to give birth. It's a minor part of the story, with the focus on Barrymore's (John that is...) seductions of both Crawford and Garbo. The two divas never cross paths or seem to be aware of the other's presence. Of the two, it's Crawford who is the most natural. Something in Garbo's performance indicates that she was pretty bored, wanting to be alone like her character, although through camera on her works its magic to fool the audience into thinking she's fully in character. Crawford shines in her energy, and her big eyes never more alluring. This has so much going for it that it is extremely difficult to find any fault. Truly a gem in pretty much every detail.

Winner of the best picture Oscar for 1932, the film is unusual in that it had no other nominations. By 1932 the sound "Talkie" had been perfected and there is no audible hiss on the soundtrack while the editing is smooth and there is now an added musical soundtrack to augment the action. On screen the close up is used over and over but in a very cinematic way, this is no medium shot filmed play. Even after 85 years the performances from the assembly of the cast is fantastically good only Garbo rather jars with her not so much theatrical more silent era over dramatics, all swaying arms and facial extortion's but this was what she gave the audience of the the time and her legions of film fans, it is hard for us now to fully appreciate just how famous she was way way back.I had never seen the film before stumbling on this very good DVD from 2013 which has a excellent transfer.The tableau of interlinked story lines then a fresh new plot device works marvellously well and i was hooked on the story from first to last, all set rather intriguingly in Berlin one year before Hitler and the Nazi's seized power.

What a cast! More stars than there are in the HEAVENS! And we get to hear Garbo moan, "I vant to be alone." Simply divoon! The audience must gotten a big kick out of this in 1932, gripped by the Great Depression, watching these hoity-toity types in their evening clothes, milling around in the most expensive hotel in Berlin, sipping champagne, eating caviar ("tastes like herring"), powerful men hitting on poor but sassy stenographers, a dying old man living it up for one last time.It's an ensemble movie and the stories get entwined. At times, it resembles one of those recent disaster movies in which you have to subject yourself to the back stories of each character. Get to know what they're like, what drives them, what moves them, why that back molar is bothering them.That's a problem in a way. In a disaster movie you can sit through the back stories knowing there's a disaster of some sort in the offing -- an avalanche, a capsized ship, flocks of deranged birds. Here, there's no catastrophe. The back stories have to carry the picture themselves.One thing really does stand out, and that's Greta Garbo's performance. It's not just her throaty voice and its curious locutions -- "finished" turns into "finched." Every line has unexpected contours. It's a little like Tommy Lee Jones. Someone asks Jones if, say, he would like a beer. "OH, yeah," he replies. The stresses come in extraordinary places.And not just that. Garbo is supposed to be a ballet dancer. At first glance it seems an unlikely career for someone so tall and gawky, with such hunched shoulders. But then you notice that when she moves around she's a human grand opera. She doesn't move from place to place, she swoops. It conjures up the body movements of John Wayne. He seemed to fling one of his body parts -- an arm or a shoulder -- in one direction and the rest of that massive bulk seemed to follow. Garbo is the same way, flinging her arms out, whirling dervishly at times.That aside, the stories are a little dull. The dialog isn't especially clever and the funny scenes, Lionel Barrymore drunk while a Charlie Chaplin tune plays in the background, may have been funny in 1932 but less so today.In any case it has an elevated position among the cognoscenti and far be it from me, a humble shoemaker, to bone it too thoroughly.