Dinner at Eight

DINNER AT EIGHT (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933), directed by George Cukor, MGM's second attempt with an all-star production following the success to GRAND HOTEL (1932), is a remarkable as well as memorable movie that has benefited from repeated viewings over the past years. As with GRAND HOTEL, DINNER AT EIGHT was adapted from a stage play (by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber), and reunites some of its GRAND HOTEL performers, including John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Jean Hersholt. Unlike GRAND HOTEL, DINNER AT EIGHT is one of the best movies ever assembled to not receive a single Academy Award nomination. Even though it would be difficult to pinpoint which of the major stars might have been worthy of that honor, a Best Picture nominee would have spoken for the entire cast. In the usual manner of all star productions, of the major leads, all introduced with each face framed in a dinner plate, the one whose name comes first is the one with either the least amount of screen time or the one whose character enters late into the story. The star in question is Marie Dressler, a top-name at the time, leaving a big impression with her limited performance, and yet, it is Billie Burke as Millicent Jordan whose presence is felt throughout mainly because it's her dinner party.

The story begins with Millicent Jordan (Burke) a New York social wife, announcing her upcoming dinner party she's arranging for Lord and Lady Ferncliffe, and the people she intends to invite. As with the stage production, the movie plays out in numerous acts: (a) "The Jordan Home": Introductory scenes focusing on Millicent (Burke), her husband Oliver (Lionel Barrymore), head of a declining shipping company, and their troubled daughter, Paula (Madge Evans); (b) "At the Office": Oliver is visited by once acclaimed stage actress Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler), with whom he had loved in his youth, as well as one of the invited guests; and Dan Packard (Wallace Beery), a middle-aged promoter whom Oliver hopes could save him from his financial difficulties; (c) "The Battling Packards": As a favor to Oliver, Millicent reluctantly telephones Kitty (Jean Harlow) and invites the low-life couple to her dinner. Kitty, spoiled and lazy, wants nothing more than to break into society and meet the right kind of people. Being home all day doing nothing, Kitty secretly carries on a love affair with her family doctor, Wayne Talbot (Edmund Lowe), while her husband goes away on business, a secret known only by Kitty's maid (Hilda Vaughn); (d) "The Matinée Idol": In need of an extra dinner guest, Millicent invites matinée idol Larry Renault (John Barrymore), a friend of the family in town staying at the Versailles Hotel. Unknown to Millicent, her engaged daughter Paula is secretly Renault's mistress; (e) "Dr. Talbot's Domestic Problems": Scene involves Kitty's doctor and his illicit affairs with his patients, as discussed between him and his understanding wife (Karen Morley). which concludes with a visit from gravely ill Oliver who is diagnosed with heart disease; (f) "Back to the Jordan Home": While Millicent is interacted between scenes involving the dinner guests, this segment involves Millicent's own domestic problems with her hired help as well as the news about her guests of honor departing for Florida, leaving Millicent to locate substitutes as the guests of honor; (g) "Final Showdown for the Packards": In their home getting ready for the function, Dan and Kitty come to a showdown revealing how they actually feel about one other, with all their secrets coming out; (h) "Renault's Tragic Performance": Renault turns down the one act part as a beachcomber in a forthcoming play offered to him by an important producer (Jean Hersholt). Believing he is still important to the theater, Renault's trying and upset agent (Lee Tracy) brings the drunken actor to reality by telling him his career has ended long ago. Later, after the management asks him to leave the hotel, Renault agrees, thus, giving his one last "performance" to take place in the room; (i) "Dinner at Eight" The gathering of all the party guests at the Jordan home, with some resolutions resolved, concluding with the most celebrated exchange between Carlotta and Kitty.

Categorized as a comedy, with the exception of some cleverly written dialog, DINNER AT EIGHT is anything but a comedy. In truth, it's actually a stylish dramatic story centering upon the troublesome lives of Millicent Jordan and chapters involving her invited guests. The most interesting, as well as tragic, is John Barrymore's as Larry Renault, and how his character closely foreshadows his own life, as a habitual drinker, a fading actor with ex-wives, now in financial ruin. He is even addressed to as "The Great Profile" by his agent (Tracy). What's even more ironic is that Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow, who closing scene is classic, each would be dead not long after the release DINNER AT EIGHT, leaving their legacies behind them. Besides the leading players, others in support include Phillips Holmes, Louise Closser Hale, May Robson, Grant Mitchell and Elizabeth Patterson, all giving capable performances under Cukor's excellent direction. No underscoring whatsoever, with the exception of "I Kiss Your Hand, Madame," which is themed during the opening credits, and orchestra playing at the final minutes of the function, DINNER AT EIGHT appears to be a motion picture that has surpassed the 1932 Broadway play.

Distributed on video cassette as far back at the 1980s, and later on DVD, DINNER AT EIGHT, which makes a good double bill along with GRAND HOTEL, frequently plays on Turner Classic Movies. While there has been a 1989 made-for-television remake which premiered on Turner Network Television, with everything brought up to date, the main course on the menu today continues to be the unsurpassed 1933 appetizer. (****)

When you gather together the great stars of the early 30's, give them a great script, a great director and let them have their head, you get "Dinner at Eight". This is a delightful film which bridges the gap between comedy and drama. Granted, it is a little dated but that it only a minor inconvenience to those of us who love this movie.

You would be hard pressed to find another actress who could play the part of Carlotta Vance with such panache as Marie Dressler.......she is magnificent. She may give the best performance in the film but she has stiff competition from the rest of this star-studded cast.

I find John Barrymore's performance particularly good as it seems to mirror his own career and problems with alcohol. Arranging himself in the right light to capture the great profile one last time is poignant. I am not a Wallace Beery fan but he is spot on as the vulgar, grasping business man with wonderful Jean Harlow as his slutty wife. She is a treat and of course, no one can forget her exchange with Dressler at the end of the film when she announces that she was reading a book! The lovely Billie Burke, who made a film career out of dithering society women (although she was a former Follies beauty and wife of Flo Ziegfeld)is a delight. Lionel Barrymore plays it pretty straight as her long suffering, tragically ill husband. Edmund Lowe passes muster as the philandering doctor and the rest of the supporting cast is as good as it gets.

They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's a movie lovers paradise!

I happened across this film today and thoroughly enjoyed it. There is much to be praised in this film, as most of the previous reviews have detailed, so I won't go on long about it. (Though I'd never seen or heard of Marie Dressler before and now I have to find some of her other movies -- anyone else think she resembles Lois Smith?)

What was remarkable to me about the film was its timelessness. So many of the problems and situations embedded in the plot can be found in the headlines of today's newspapers and tabloids. Of course economic downturns, adultery, and social-climbing are common fodder for movies, but it is unusual for classic films to go into some of the nasty details without becoming melodramatic; they describe sexual addiction, for heaven's sake! I've never seen humanity so realistically portrayed in a classic film before (despite the moments that some would call "over-acting") and so this movie made me feel more connected to the past than I have ever before.

This film followed MGM's great success of the previous year, "Grand Hotel", as it afforded the studio a showcase for some of its talented stars. "Dinner at Eight" is one of the classic plays of that era, having been written for the stage by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber. The screen adaptation of the play is by Herman Mankiewicz, Frances Marion and Donald Ogden Stewart, some of the best writers the movies ever had. The film, under the impeccable direction of George Cukor makes "Dinner at Eight" one of the classics of the American cinema.

"Dinner at Eight" is a comedy, at heart, but there are elements of drama in it, as well. On the one hand, it offers easy laughter for the viewer, but it also has a dark aspect in its dealing with alcoholism and adultery. The film, like its predecessor, offers several story lines that keeps us interested in the different relationships the film presents for us.

"Dinner at Eight" boasts one of the best casts ever assembled for a movie. Marie Dressler, who is seen as Carlota Vance, was one of the best actresses working in the movies at the time. Lionel and John Barrymore had been seen together in "Grand Hotel" and both play pivotal parts in this film as well. The effervescent Billie Burke is one of the best things in the movie. Ms. Burke was one bright star whose contribution to the success of the films she appeared in was a guarantee for the people behind any project.

Wallace Beery plays the boorish and influential industrialist Dan Packard, a man to be reckoned with. Jean Harlow portrays his wife, the low life Kitty, who was two-timing Dan. In a way, Dan and Kitty seem to have been the prototypes for Garson Kanin's "Born Yesterday" because both characters bear a certain similarity in both films.

The supporting members of the cast are impressive. Edmund Lowe, Lee Tracy, Madge Evans, Louise Closser Hale, May Robson, Jean Hersholt, Karen Morley, and the rest, aside from giving good performances, leave their own mark in the film.

A great cinematographer was behind the camera for this movie: William Daniels. His amazing work is one of the best in any of the pictures he photographed. Mr. Daniels knew how to direct his camera to get the most out of these talented actors one sees in "Dinner at Eight" Of course, this is a film that bears the David O. Selznick signature, for it was he who decided to transform the play into a motion picture and he succeeded in doing it. Most of the creditor must go to director George Cukor, who was truly inspired in making "Dinner at Eight" a movie that has endured the passage of time.

Among the great actresses who have helped to illuminate the silver screen, Marie Dressler may be Chateau d'Yquem – a grand premier cru, in a class all her own. As aging star of the theatuh Carlotta Vance, a living relic of the 'Delmonico' era in New York, she walks away with an immortal movie, as entertaining a contraption as the studio system ever confected. And she does it effortlessly, despite some very tough competition – the most lustrous talent MGM could summon in the worst year of the Depression, and maybe the best it was ever able to gather together in the many constellations it assembled.

Dressler heads a large ensemble cast, with several distinct but interlocking stories, all leading up to (but never quite making) a posh dinner party at the mansion of Billie Burke, wife of shipping magnate Lionel Barrymore. Desperately trying to snag (the unseen) Lord and Lady Ferncliffe – moldering aristocrats she once met at Cap d'Antibes – Burke bullies and badgers everybody she can think of to seat a swank table. Worrying about nothing so much as how 'dressy' the aspic will be – it's the British Lion molded out of a quivering gelatin – she's oblivious to the human dramas whirling around the people on her guest list.

For starters, her husband is not only seriously ill but close to bankruptcy, to boot. Down in his nautical offices on The Battery, he's paid a visit by an old (and older than he) flame, Dressler; a bit down on her luck herself ('I'm flatter than a pancake – I haven't a sou'), she wants to sell her stock in his company. Another visitor, one of the sharks circling around to feast on his bleeding empire. is Wallace Beery, a loud-mouthed boor whom Barrymore nonetheless cajoles Burke into inviting, against her snobbish sensibilities. Beery, a politically connected wheeler-dealer, has problems of his own, namely his wife Jean Harlow. She lounges luxuriously in bed most of the day, changing in and out of fur-trimmed bed jackets and sampling chocolates while waiting for her doctor-lover (Edmund Lowe) to pay another house call under the pretext of tending to her imaginary ailments.

Burke's and Barrymore's young daughter, meanwhile, conceals a clandestine affair with 'free, white and 45" marquee idol John Barrymore, a washed-up drunk whose grandiose airs can't even fool the bellboys he sends out for bottles of hooch (a storyline in the screenplay, co-written by the also alcoholic Herman J. Mankiewicz – from the George S. Kaufmann/Edna Ferber stage hit – that can't have been comfortable for the similarly afflicted Barrymore, who's even referred to in the movie by his emblematic sobriquet 'The Great Profile').

Those are the major strands of the story, but there's even more talent on board: Louise Closser Hale as Burke's pithy cousin; May Robson as the cook in charge of the ill-starred aspic; Lee Tracy, as John Barrymore's exasperated agent; and, deliciously, Hilda Vaughn as Harlow's mercenary maid.

The goings-on range from the farcical to the tragic, and for the most part, the cast does proud in coping with the often drastic shifts of tone (true, some episodes carry more weight than others, some players less inspired than their colleagues; it's an episodic movie, at times dated, from the infancy of talkies when scenes were not a snappily edited few seconds but prolonged and often stagy).

Still, in this starry cast, Dressler shines brightest. A Canadian gal who started in the circus, she worked in vaudeville, theater, and, in the last few decades of her life, in Hollywood. Despite her girth and the delapidations gravity had worked on her face, she's never less than transfixing. She tosses off the requisite comedy as effortlessly as that oldest of pros that she had become, yet can draw the camera to her deeply kohled eyes when she imparts some very bad news and turn it into a few seconds of threnody. (Only Barbara Stanwyck commands so boundless a range, which we have the luxury of observing over several decades of her career; what survives of Dressler dates only from her few last years.) Dressler would make but one more movie before her death, but it's chivalrous to think of Dinner At Eight as her grand exit.

As Dinner At Eight winds down, the aspic never makes it to table, nor do some of the expected guests. But life plods on, if capriciously and unfairly. Burke, at the end of her tether, utters a plangent cry that sums up man's impotence against the cruelty of fate: 'Crabmeat...CRABMEAT!'