Studio Profiles, Europe: War & Reconstruction

This week’s film that we watched was Grand Hotel. Grand Hotel is a 1932 American drama film directed by Edmund Goulding and produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. This film was proven influential in the years since its original release. From the film, the line “I want to be alone”, said by Greta Garbo, placed number 30 in AFI’s 100 years….100 Movie Quotes. In other sources, it states that “the phrase “Grand Hotel theme” has come to be used for any dramatic movie following the activities of various people in a large busy place, with some characters’ lives overlapping in odd ways and some of them remaining unaware of one another’s existence. In 2007, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”” At the time this film was made, Hitler was about a year and a half away from becoming Chancellor.

The picture above is from a scene from Grand hotel. The man in the picture is the Baron and the woman is Grusinskaya, also known as the dancer. The Baron supports himself as a card player and occasionally a jewel thief. In this scene, the Baron was in the dancer’s room stealing her jewelry and when she came back from the theater, he hid in her room. While hiding, he overhears her talking to herself about wanting to end it all. He then comes out and starts talking to her. If I was her, I would have ran out my room and call someone for help but she did the opposite. She engaged in conversation with him, then finding herself very attracted to him. The following morning, the Baron returns the jewel to her and tells her about his criminal acts and she forgave him. Shortly after, they are all over each other and the dancer was very very happy, singing and dancing all around her room.  After he invites him to join her to Vienna and he accepted but a tragedy happened which stopped him from joining her and she had to leave him.

Over the years of my life, I have watched so many movies, seeing all the productions and distributions of films and I never really knew the background of these. I’ve seen this lion a million times and I never even paid attention to the name or anything. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of feature films and television programs.  MGM was founded in 1924. Forty- seven years later, it was announced that MGM would merge with 20th Century Fox, a plan that never happened. Over the next 39 years, the studio was bought and sold at various points of history until MGM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010. MGM was the last studio to convert to sound pictures from the end of the silent film era through the late 1950s. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the dominant motion picture studio in Hollywood.

Sources

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hotel_(1932_film)

– Grand hotel (Goulding, 1932)

– https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Hollywood Studio System and 1930s American Cinema

The bride of Frankenstein is a 1935 American science-fiction horror film, the first sequel to Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein.  I’ve heard about Frankenstein but I never watched any of the films. I enjoyed this film very much. In the film, the people feared him and called him The Monster. The only reason he was so bad was because the people were attacking him. Due to that, he fought back which caused some terrible accidents. The scene with the blind man shows that Frankenstein wasn’t actually bad. The blind man became his friend and he learned to speak. But then, intruders came in and messed everything up. In the picture above, a scientist decided to create someone for Frankenstein , but then she did not like him. She saw him and started screaming. All the time and energy that they took to bring her alive for her not not like him was a waste. The picture above shows how scared she was. Frankenstein just wanted a friend. At the end, when things didn’t turn out the way it should have. Frankenstein caused a huge accident, which took that whole building down.

This image was of the first time Frankenstein was introduced to Cigar. At first, he didn’t like it because he thought the fire and smoke was bad; because of previous incidents. But his blind friend told him it was good. Fire is good and bad. The blind man made him smoke the cigar and he like it after that. In another scene, in a cemetery, a guy sat down drinking and eating over a casket and you would think he would scream and run away  when he saw Frankenstein but he didn’t. Instead, he gave Frankenstein a glass to drink with him and a cigar because he was pointing at it. I thought it was funny that he was reaching to get a cigar. He only tried it once and since then, he fell in love with it. At that moment, that guy asked him if he wanted a female friend so he got another scientist to help him to put together a working heart and brain. At the end the bride of Frankenstein came to live.

D.W. Griffith was the first American director to establish the cultural significance of motion pictures. He was known as the father of the American film. Griffith started out as a poet and playwright but was signed as an actor. Over the years of his life, he made about 500 films by the time of his final feature. He is remembered for his epic melodramas, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), which became the “grammar and rhetoric” for feature-length films. According to the reading “Due to the film’s deplorable depiction of blacks, and his support for the vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan, Griffith was charged with racism and his film faced nationwide censorship.” Griffith films are filled with his own idea of good and bad. His second film Intolerance, “dealt with our humanity to on another in hopes of quieting the racial controversy over The Birth of a Nation.”

Sources

Bride of Frankenstein film (Whale, 1935 – 75m)

An Introduction to World Cinema by Aristides Gazetas pg 31-40