Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us about them!
Ah, hotels! The glamour! The romance! The allure of travel!
...or at least it used to be, way back when. Nowadays, hotels are either super-luxurious (and thus super-expensive) or cheap cinder-block rooms with barely any class to them at all.
Guess which I prefer?
The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934) Not the best of the Astaire-Rogers pictures, but one of their earliest and most enjoyable. All the tropes of their films are set here, and in high style (the film received an Oscar nomination for Art Direction) at a European hotel where Ginger goes to stage an affair so she can get a divorce. Edward Everett Horton is her bumbling lawyer (and was there a better, gayer bumbler in Old Hollywood?) and ex-fiancee of her much-married Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady), Erik Rhodes the man she's supposed to get caught with, and Fred of course a friend of Horton's who once nurtured a crush on Ginger. If that all sounds like every other of the pair's films, then let me help: This is the one with "Night and Day", Betty Grable, and the fabulous 20-minute finale to "The Continental".
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) One of the great mysteries of cinema, Last Year at Marienbad sort of defies description at a plot level. It concerns a man and woman meeting at a hotel. He says they have met before, she says they have not. But in the hands of screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, founder of the "new novel", it becomes so much more: a treatise on memory, a puzzle to be solved, a gorgeous bauble to look at as a jeweler looks at a diamond.
Plaza Suite (Arthur Hiller, 1971) Neil Simon wrote three Suite plays (the other two are California and London), and this is the best. Three scenes take place in the same suite at New York's famed Plaza Hotel. These films perhaps don't feel like great choices for adaptations from the stage, as the plays are designed to take place on one set and make good use of the three-act structure, but the star turns from Barbara Harris, Lee Grant, Maureen Stapleton, and of course Walter Matthau, justify the film's existence. If you're allergic to Matthau, stay away, but otherwise, this is an alternately touching and funny picture.
