The Lord of the Hotel: The Return of the Concierge

MIKE: Only five Best Picture winners have won all the Oscars for which they were nominated, and we have two of them in this installment. In 1932, Grand Hotel became the only film to win Best Picture without winning, or even being nominated for, any other awards. It presents the intertwining tales of people living in various states of desperation at the finest hotel in Berlin: broke baron John Barrymore, dying bookkeeper Lionel Barrymore, stenographer (etc.) Joan Crawford, Prussian industrialist Wallace Beery, and depressive diva Greta Garbo. On the other end of the calendar is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose eleven-for-eleven tied it for the most Oscars ever. Shortly before its thirty-seven endings, epic battles occur, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) is wise, Gimli and Legolas (John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom) bond homosocially, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) destroy the ring, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) becomes king.

The two films present a perfect storm of nerdy Best Picture statistics trivia: only ten films have won the big prize without a single acting nomination, and these two are on that list as well. What's up with that? Grand Hotel presents a banquet of movie stars working at the top of their game; is it simply the lack of supporting categories and the limited space (three slots each) in the lead categories that caused its shutout? What do you think about these performances? And whereas great acting isn't the focus of the Lord of the Rings saga, does its lone nomination (Ian McKellan's for the first installment) give the series enough credit for its stars' acting chops? (Yeah, I know we're dealing with just this one film, but you'd have to be drunk on Louisiana Flips to think all those Oscars weren't for the entire series.)

NICK: See, that brings up a big point for me right away. Even if The Return of the King pitched that perfect Oscar game in part because AMPAS wanted to reward the whole trilogy, and even though principal photography was (famously) continuous on all three installments, I can't help thinking that The Return of the King is a stylistically different and frankly inferior picture to The Fellowship of the Ring. Not that it's a huge difference; I still like ROTK a lot, and it has plenty of the expressive color, the detailed designs and locations, the energy, the scale, and the emotional breadth that subtends the whole wonderful series. But I feel like ROTK gets stuck too often in these magnified close-ups of actors in frankly unimaginative frames, and the editing patterns don't keep all the fields of action and conflict as pristinely differentiated or as exciting as Fellowship did. (All three installments indeed boast different lead editors.) The serial and very protracted endings are a big problem for me in ROTK, and since you bring up acting, Mike, the emphasis on close-ups in ROTK, which should be even more actor-friendly, instead keeps emphasizing that some of the cast don't have the full control and technique that their roles require (Elijah Wood, John Noble) and others keep trying to screw their faces up and force out a convincing tear or two or twenty (Sean Astin especially, but also Billy Boyd). It's a tenser, fuller, more majestic movie than Two Towers, but I don't think it's the series apex that I coveted, or that Oscar commemorated, and I don't think it's as deserving a winner as Fellowship would have been.

Big pluses: That Gollum-centric opening is still a corker, and the lighting of the beacons is a reliable thrill. And Shelob. Big minus: "Shadowfax, show us the meaning of haste!" This won for screenplay?

NATHANIEL: But it didn't win for screenplay... the trilogy won. I'd go so far as to say that all of the LotR wins and nominations are based on the whole, projected (in the first two years) or existing (once Return was playing). It's hard to hold the Academy's attention—this isn't (usually) the EMMYs where you can phone it in once you're well liked—but generally once you've got awards momentum, you've won half the battle. Return of the King had three years of mass emotional investment propping it up even if it hadn't proved as satisfying as it did.

I'll beat a dead horse and agree that it stumbles with those multiple endings. Not because they're there (there are dozens of characters to bid farewell to you know) but because Jackson underlines their ending quality so much. Why the multiple fadeouts? What a weirdly misjudged repeat "gotcha!" that decision proved. It reminds me of that great line from The Age of Innocence: "Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it." Why toy with our natural desire to exit the theater after three plus hours of satiating thrills? I suspect that if you simply erased the fadeouts—maybe a cross dissolve instead?—there would've been less griping.

But let's stay positive. There's so much to love. In both movies I might add. Is it just me or is Joan Crawford, often disparagingly viewed as something of a Shelob herself, a total kick in the pants in Grand Hotel? She's my favorite part of the movie and I like most of its parts.

NICK: I agree, it's not just the quantity of endings in ROTK, but beyond their constant elegiac quality, it's the insistence on soothing beauty that puts me off at the end. After the highest-stakes global struggle imaginable, the world has no scars or stretch-marks, the light gleams, and the actors get pushed in all those closing scenes between ineffable sorrow and beatific grins, often on a dime. I really feel like the emotional AND the narrative threads get sacrificed to bland, reassuring spectacle in those conclusions.

But, as requested, I'll stop griping: and yes, Joan Crawford is amazing in Grand Hotel. Even as the other actors spin reliable or even engaging versions of the archetypes assigned to them, Joan is by far the craftiest at making Flaemmchen neither "good" nor "bad" and keeping us guessing about the character...despite keeping her playing style so simple and direct.

Grand Hotel has at least as many close-ups per minute as Return of the King, but to such a different purpose: you are practically watching the advent of 30s-era movie stardom as you watch Grand Hotel, as the camera extracts as much behavioral implication and palpable personality as it can just by doting on these scrupulously lit faces. The stars become an indispensable part of Art Deco style, sleek and cool and reflective. But they also capture enough of the longing and desperation built into the script that the movie doesn't feel completely weightless... and stardom itself is more interesting for its connotations of loneliness and unreality.

MIKE: I like what you said about the dawn of 30s-era stardom, Nick, and it fits with what went on offscreen—Garbo and Crawford fought over screen time, Garbo and Beery refused to sign until they got extravagant salaries, and Garbo seems to be willing to poke a little fun at her own superstardom—"I just vant to be alone" and all that. I'm so glad we all agree about how great Crawford is here. For me, she nails the film's surprisingly dark ambience best. I love her most in the scenes where she's negotiating her relationships with the men around her, first with John Barrymore as the two of them, through some of the film's best dialogue, recognize a mirror image in the other, and later with Wallace Beery as they hash out the terms of her "employment." Like everyone in the film, she's grasping desperately for control over something in her life, and like everyone, her control is mostly an illusion. I think the only actor who doesn't nail practically every scene is Lionel Barrymore, who overplays his drunk scenes and is saddled with some painful "you like me, you really like me" lines, but his confrontation with Beery in the bar is one of the film's best moments.

I don't want to slight its technical achievements, either—Nick alluded to the great lighting and Art Deco sets, but I was especially impressed with the camera work, which seems to have recovered from the great-step-backward of Cimarron and recaptured All Quiet on the Western Front's fluidity. Those twin show-offy tracking shots through the lobby are fun, but I especially appreciated that it eschewed the boring pattern of 20-foot-high establishing shots and medium shots of its predecessor, instead valuing those luscious closeups. And I don't want to rewatch even a second of Cimmaron to double-check this, but is this the first of our Best Pictures with an incidental score—not just over the titles, but during dialogue scenes as well?

NATHANIEL: Ah but what hath Grand Hotel wrought in doing so? I love the star mojo in the movie but the closeups are so well lit and performed and it's not always this way. Movies are rarely this careful in lighting now. And the acting... well, there's not always a reason to be cropping out entire bodies and even the tops and bottom of star faces as is the current style. I don't really want to measure the size of an actors pores. I just want to be wowed by screen beauty. Nowadays actors will get full frame treatment even if they're just doing something incidental like ordering food. It dilutes the actual potency of the important closeups. I love long shots and medium shots.

MIKE: The shots in GH really do show us how much has changed. By 1932, the "classic Hollywood look" seems to have been pretty much in place, as demonstrated here, and films made from there until the end of the studio system seemed to have a basic grasp of shot and editing patterns that gave proper weight to various shot sizes (of course I'm totally overgeneralizing). Each type of shot has its place, even the eyebrow-to-chin closeup favored today (and even the handheld shakycam that seems to be the default now), but I wish modern filmmakers thought variation was more important.

NATHANIEL: I hadn't really thought about this in terms of Lord of the Rings but as Nick suggested, the closeups in the third installment don't always pay off. It's one of the reasons I've never sat down to watch the trilogy back to back to back. I fear that after seeing Elijah Wood (bless) worry beatifically in tight closeup 20 times, you've seen all there is to see. And I'm guessing it's a lot more than 20 times if you do the marathon. Would the trilogy have lost some of its magic if we didn't have those year long breaks?

NICK: Oh, we wouldn't want to berate Grand Hotel for its paler (that is, even glossier) imitators any more than we'd want to arraign The Lord of the Rings for all of the Narnias and Golden Compasses and Spiderwicks we've been sloshing through since. If anything, when I see something like Pan's Labyrinth being robustly over-praised and over-Oscared, which never would have happened pre-LOTR, I'm glad to see an under-served genre like fantasy enjoying some benefit of the doubt, even from the AARP—I mean, AMPAS.

I've never done a 12-hour Rings-o-rama, either, Nathaniel, and I agree that the films wouldn't necessarily benefit. I'm guessing a lot of the battle scenes would start to look the same and the big speeches would run together—even within ROTK, this becomes a problem—and I've already made clear that the first installment is, for me, the grandest and the smartest.

MIKE: I think the pacing of the releases was perfect. Closer together, and I'd have overdosed on them; farther apart, and my faulty memory would have required revisits of the previous films (and perhaps forced me to give in to the temptation to watch the overindulgent "extended editions"). Speaking of losing some magic, I found that I was a lot less involved in ROTK watching it on my TV at home. It felt like theatrical viewing is required for something that's shooting for this level of majesty. I found the effects to be less convincing and the sheer blow-you-away scale I remember from seeing it in the theater to be pretty much gone. I still think it's a pretty great film, but its flaws are a lot more visible on the smaller screen (which seems counterintuitive).

NICK: Since I've been a bit stingy with my praise and I know we're all fans, I love the sheer, striving spectacle and the lack of cynicism that Return of the King brought to multiplexes, and I do love almost any BP winner that is such an anomalous pick for Oscar. For that matter, I'm hard-pressed to think of another Best Picture winner that much resembles Grand Hotel, either, in its unique blend of escapism and melancholy, and its successful admixture of dissimilar actors. Who knew that Crawford and Beery could shine in the same movie, and that any scenery could survive with two Barrymores on the premises? Future crazy-quilts of star cameos like some of the 1950s winners don't come anywhere close to what this picture achieves. Grand Hotel and Lord of the Rings aren't perfect, but their strongest elements and their dodgiest imitators confirm how special they are... and though neither would have won my vote, I love that Oscar's frequently lockstep voters appreciated and stood behind them.

Readers, what do you think about serial endings, use and abuse of closeups, Joan Crawford, our neglect of poor Gollum, etc. etc.?

More stuff: Nathaniel's post, Nick's post.

Previously: #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men