Dinner at Eight (1933) Reviews

• Deeeeelicious!

  Bucs19602004-03-30

  When you gather together the great stars of the early 30's, give them a great script, a great director and let them have their head, you get "Dinner at Eight". This is a delightful film which bridges the gap between comedy and drama. Granted, it is a little dated but that it only a minor inconvenience to those of us who love this movie. You would be hard pressed to find another actress who could play the part of Carlotta Vance with such panache as Marie Dressler.......she is magnificent. She may give the best performance in the film but she has stiff competition from the rest of this star-studded cast. I find John Barrymore's performance particularly good as it seems to mirror his own career and problems with alcohol. Arranging himself in the right light to capture the great profile one last time is poignant. I am not a Wallace Beery fan but he is spot on as the vulgar, grasping business man with wonderful Jean Harlow as his slutty wife. She is a treat and of course, no one can forget her exchange with Dressler at the end of the film when she announces that she was reading a book! The lovely Billie Burke, who made a film career out of dithering society women (although she was a former Follies beauty and wife of Flo Ziegfeld)is a delight. Lionel Barrymore plays it pretty straight as her long suffering, tragically ill husband. Edmund Lowe passes muster as the philandering doctor and the rest of the supporting cast is as good as it gets. They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's a movie lovers paradise!

• An All-Star Classic

  Ron Oliver2000-02-12

  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...

• A starry showcase (and all but grand exit) for consummate scene-stealer Dressler

  bmacv2004-08-17

  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!'

• VIPs, past and future.

  FilmSnobby2005-03-14

  Talk about an all-star lineup. I'm referring to the WRITERS of *Dinner at Eight*. Get a load of this list: George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, who wrote the original stage play; Francis Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay; and Donald Ogden Stewart applying garnish (and varnish). These names are even more impressive than the cast-list: Brothers Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Billie Burke, Wallace Beery, et al. All under the direction of George Cukor in a film produced by David O. Selznick for MGM, which at the time (1933), was run by Irving G. Thalberg. "Old Hollywood" enough for you? Of course, you'll have to make allowances for the primitive mise-en-scene -- after all, talkies had been around for only a few years when this movie was made. The new innovation of sound was considered a more than fair compensation for the loss of the visual pyrotechnics introduced by the great silent directors like Griffith. Therefore, movies from this particular era look boxed in, stuffed with talk, talk, and more talk. Luckily in this instance, the talk is generally interesting, almost always witty, and attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. Finally, the whole piece is shot through with that certain world-weariness that comes from creative artists attempting to assess, and say goodbye to, the end of an epoch. Let me expand a bit on that. Consider three of the characters: first, there's Marie Dressler's former stage actress, a sort of grande dame Sarah Bernhardt type, now old and corpulent, keeping a merciless eye on her finances, wistfully recounting the glories of the long-past era of Delmonico's and horse-drawn carriages on The Broad Way. There's her long-time friend (and former beau), Lionel Barrymore, a sclerotic magnate of a shipping empire. His heart and his business have both seen better days. And finally there's John Barrymore (the Barrymores don't play brothers in the movie; in fact, they never share a moment of screen time), a washed-up, has-been, 47-year-old movie star of the silent era, living in a posh hotel room he can't afford, haunted by the memory of fame and three ex-wives, pestered by a 19-year-old girlfriend who won't allow him to drink himself to death. These characters are the most obvious symbols of an era that has passed . . . but even Billie Burke's nervous socialite, with her humorously single-minded pursuit of the perfect dinner party, represents a melancholy reflection of What Used to Be. When her husband Lionel confesses to her that his shipping business is going broke in the new age of airplanes, we know that dinner parties will be the least of her worries in the near future. There's a Depression on, you know. And modernity -- the current, heartless variety -- is hot on everyone's heels. The movie sets these relics against the crass New Breed, typified by the most unlikely husband-and-wife team in the history of movies: Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery. While Beery goes about the business of destroying Lionel's business, Harlow lolls around in bed wearing fur-trimmed gowns, noshing chocolates. Even their maid is a disrespectful blackmailer, demanding from Harlow "hush-jewelry" to keep from mentioning Harlow's adulteries to her husband. But somewhere between having an affair with her doctor and clawing her way into "respectable" society, Harlow manages to find her own core of decency: she keeps that pig of a husband on the (relatively) up-and-up. The movie's writers don't ENTIRELY give up on the new generation. Harlow is even reading a book -- a NUTTY kind of a book, but it's a positive sign nevertheless. Dressler's double-take after hearing Harlow confess to reading a book is, of course, world-famous. Everyone remembers Dressler's punch-line, too. But too few pause to think of what Harlow describes her book to be about: a society in which machines do all of the work for us, a society in which machines will virtually replace us. And thus this brings us back to theme of the passing genteel age and the coming new age, with its attendant ugliness parading under the banner of "progress". Yes, Harlow will never be replaced, as Dressler points out. But who among us is Jean Harlow? *Dinner at Eight* is probably the snappiest dirge, the wittiest elegy, ever produced by Hollywood. It was made in an era when actual artists worked in that L.A. suburb -- unlike the automatons running the show today. As such, it's prophetic about the art-form to which it belongs, as well. 9 stars out 10.

• Five course dinner

  jotix1002005-12-03

  This film followed MGM's great success of the previous year, "Grand Hotel", as it afforded the studio a showcase for some of its talented stars. "Dinner at Eight" is one of the classic plays of that era, having been written for the stage by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber. The screen adaptation of the play is by Herman Mankiewicz, Frances Marion and Donald Ogden Stewart, some of the best writers the movies ever had. The film, under the impeccable direction of George Cukor makes "Dinner at Eight" one of the classics of the American cinema. "Dinner at Eight" is a comedy, at heart, but there are elements of drama in it, as well. On the one hand, it offers easy laughter for the viewer, but it also has a dark aspect in its dealing with alcoholism and adultery. The film, like its predecessor, offers several story lines that keeps us interested in the different relationships the film presents for us. "Dinner at Eight" boasts one of the best casts ever assembled for a movie. Marie Dressler, who is seen as Carlota Vance, was one of the best actresses working in the movies at the time. Lionel and John Barrymore had been seen together in "Grand Hotel" and both play pivotal parts in this film as well. The effervescent Billie Burke is one of the best things in the movie. Ms. Burke was one bright star whose contribution to the success of the films she appeared in was a guarantee for the people behind any project. Wallace Beery plays the boorish and influential industrialist Dan Packard, a man to be reckoned with. Jean Harlow portrays his wife, the low life Kitty, who was two-timing Dan. In a way, Dan and Kitty seem to have been the prototypes for Garson Kanin's "Born Yesterday" because both characters bear a certain similarity in both films. The supporting members of the cast are impressive. Edmund Lowe, Lee Tracy, Madge Evans, Louise Closser Hale, May Robson, Jean Hersholt, Karen Morley, and the rest, aside from giving good performances, leave their own mark in the film. A great cinematographer was behind the camera for this movie: William Daniels. His amazing work is one of the best in any of the pictures he photographed. Mr. Daniels knew how to direct his camera to get the most out of these talented actors one sees in "Dinner at Eight" Of course, this is a film that bears the David O. Selznick signature, for it was he who decided to transform the play into a motion picture and he succeeded in doing it. Most of the creditor must go to director George Cukor, who was truly inspired in making "Dinner at Eight" a movie that has endured the passage of time.