User reviews

Frank Vosper sports a moustache like that worn by Emil Jannings in 'The Last Laugh' as a White Russian emigre living in greatly reduced circumstances about to get the boot after eleven years as a night manager in a hotel in this sombre quota quickie by veteran director George Pearson, made in the bad old days that Bernard Miles ironically deplores to Percy Walsh (who plays Vosper's boss) a few years later in the wartime short 'The Dawn Guard'.

Nearly all the sympathetic characters lead lives blighted by lack of money, including Gillian Lind forced to sell herself on the streets, Lewis Shaw whose wife is terminally ill in those far-off pre-NHS days, and a young Geraldine Fitzgerald as a typist forced into the clammy embrace of her predatory boss because she stole the then-astronomical sum of £20.

(Vosper, by the way, had recently played the villain in Hitchcock's original version of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'. Hitchcock probably lifted the close-up near the end of Vosper's hand holding the gun for 'Spellbound'; or may even have suggested it in the first place!)

This quota quickie was directed by veteran George Pearson,whose career started in 1913.It is very watchable and looks as if more money was spent on it than average.It centres on the stories of a number of people who frequent the Paragon House.The central figure is Anton played by Frank Vosper,who a couple of years later died mysteriously when he disappeared overboard from a transatlantic liner.

Frank Vosper was the Grand Duke of Russia. Now he's the night manager of the Paragon House Hotel, hoping for a promotion to general manager. It's a popular night spot, where all sorts of people mingle and, as call girl Gillian Lind says a couple of times, nothing ever happens.

This Grand Hotel rip-off from Quota Quickie specialist Twickenham Studios focuses more on the events surrounding Vosper than the better remembered MGM all-star production. It's also much more urbane, with its focus on the middle class and the struggling lower class and some real problems. A man tries to get a loan back,so he can take his dying wife to a Viennese specialist to save her; Geraldine Fitzgerald (in her second screen appearance) 'borrows' twenty pounds from her employer and is being blackmailed by her manager; and a bellhop doesn't understand why he is to tell a lady it's an hour later than it is.

It's certainly not a great movie under the direction of George Pearson. Twickenham didn't do those, and Pearson's star had fallen very far from the silent era. But it tells its stories quickly and facilely.

Modest British drama which begins well but struggles to provide convincing conclusions to its stories. Vaguely reminiscent of Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh in both bearing and situation, Franz Vosper cuts an imposing but sympathetic figure.