Dinner at Eight

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.

Dinner at Eight is one of the consummate movie buff's movies...

It has romance, glamour, wit, charm, intrigue, interesting characters and a great story.

The agonies that Mrs. Oliver Jordan (the incomparable Billie Burke [Are you a good witch or a bad witch?]) must go through to stage what is supposed to be a simple dinner party will leave you laughing, sympathizing and grateful you are not her.

Jean Harlow is at her most beautiful. She radiates an overt yet somehow innocent sexuality that shows why she became a major star so quickly.

Marie Dressler proves why she was so heralded. Her acting cannot be called subtle -- but it is always effective.

After watching this film you will wonder if people ever really did live this way. Strangely enough, I believe they probably did.

A flamboyant old actress with memories of lovers long dead. An alcoholic actor desperate for one more chance on the stage. An Oklahoma tycoon and his below-the-tracks, tough as nails wife. A philandering doctor and his faithful wife. They're all invited to meet tonight at the mansion home of a dying industrialist and his flighty, society-obsessed wife for DINNER AT EIGHT.

Following the great success of GRAND HOTEL in 1932, MGM & producer David O. Selznick embarked on producing an even greater all-star triumph. They succeeded. DINNER AT EIGHT takes a first class list of performers at the top of their form (Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Billie Burke) and seamlessly, if a bit implausibly, weaves a plot full of comedy & tragedy which allows each star to strut their stuff.

Dressler was Hollywood's top star at this time and she is wonderful, fingering her jewelry - each piece a remembrance of an ancient romance. She has only one scene with gorgeous Harlow and that comes at the very end of the film, but it's a classic.

The rest of the cast is a wonderful grab bag of talent: peppery Lee Tracy, elderly Louise Closser Hale, gentle Jean Hersholt, as well as Phillips Holmes, Edmund Lowe, Karen Morley, Madge Evans, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, May Robson, Herman Bing.

Take a moment to consider Edward Woods, playing Eddie the bell boy. The year before at Warner Brothers he had traded roles with James Cagney in a little picture called PUBLIC ENEMY. Cagney became an instant, huge celebrity. Woods continued to play bell boy roles...

What a cast - MGM's finest in a series of vignettes leading up to Mrs Jordan's dinner party (which we never actually see). Jean Harlow is at her wisecracking best and her most stunning; Marie Dressler and John Barrymore are terrific as washed-up actors; everyone is just excellent. Everything that can possibly go wrong does - you can't help but sympathise as Billie Burke's Mrs Jordan gradually gets more and more ruffled by the day's events. Some great one liners and yet another excellent entry on Cukor's CV.

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!'