Where to watch Grand Hotel (1932)

Trivia & production notes

• Producer Irving Thalberg bought the film rights to Vicki Baum's novel for $13,000, then commissioned a Broadway stage adaptation that ran for 459 performances before greenlit the movie with a $700,000 budget.
• Grand Hotel marked the first time brothers Lionel and John Barrymore appeared in a film together.
• The hotel lobby set featured a 360-degree front desk that let audiences watch action from all around the characters, fundamentally changing how sets were constructed in filmmaking afterward.
• Greta Garbo's famous line "I want to be alone" was actually spoken three different ways in the film, though Garbo later clarified she never said it that way in real life, insisting she only asked to be "let alone."
• Marie Dressler was initially cast as Suzette but was replaced with Rafaela Ottiano, who was the only cast member to reprise her role from the Broadway production.
• Grand Hotel opened at New York's Astor Theatre on April 12, 1932 and played there for nearly five months, then ran for 11 weeks at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.
• According to MGM records, the film earned $1,235,000 domestically and $1,359,000 internationally, generating an estimated profit of $947,000.
• Critics praised director Edmund Goulding for giving Greta Garbo her due with ingenious camera work that took advantage of what cinema offered over the stage version.
• The film pioneered the ensemble portmanteau movie format by being the first to successfully combine recognizable star names with intersecting stories into a box-office hit.
• Despite some stiffness in its production, critics and later commentators recognized Grand Hotel as perhaps the definitive example of old Hollywood glamour and what stardom originally meant on screen.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Grand Hotel (1932 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.