Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies screening of Dinner at Eight, David Selznick’s first film as a producer at MGM. I’d earlier written about this on June 16, 2006 when Charles and I first saw it, and here’s what I had to say about it then. Incidentally, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz – whose grandfather, Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-wrote the script for Dinner at Eight – said that director George Cukor had to fight to be allowed to cast Jean Harlow in this film. He didn’t say whom the studio wanted him to use in her place, though I suspect it was another star from Grand Hotel, Joan Crawford.)

The film I picked was Dinner at Eight, a movie I’d been chasing for a while and finally got to screen. It was made at MGM and premiered in New York on August 23, 1933 — just 10 months after the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play on which it was based had its New York premiere. It was scripted by Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz, directed by George Cukor (his first MGM assignment) and produced by David O. Selznick (his first job at MGM after having quit as head of production at RKO; since he was married to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene this provoked all the Hollywood “wits” to joke that “the son-in-law also rises”), though aside from its source play the real template was Grand Hotel, which Irving Thalberg had produced at MGM the year before. Not only is it a similar ensemble piece (the sort of movie that was relatively easy to make under the studio system because Star A could do scenes while Star B was busy making another film, Star B could work while Star C was otherwise occupied, and they could do a scene between Stars A and C while B was doing something else) but at least three of the cast members, Lionel and John Barrymore and Wallace Beery, carried over and played strikingly similar roles.

The story revolves around a fancy dinner party organized by Millicent Jordan (Billie Burke at her chirpiest) to honor the fabulously wealthy Lord and Lady Ferncliffe, whom she and her husband Oliver (Lionel Barrymore) met in Europe the year before; the frenetic preparations for the dinner and the troubles that surround her invitees — and, to be frank, the various plot strands aren’t connected anywhere near as well as in Grand Hotel and for that I would have to blame Kaufman and Ferber. In a hotel one expects to have casual encounters between people who, aside from the coincidence of staying at the same hostelry, would have no other reason to know each other; at a dinner party one expects there to be some connections between the guests and the hosts, and Kaufman and Ferber structured their characters and situations to create them and strained the bounds of credibility to do so. Oliver Jordan is the unknowing victim of a takeover attempt by self-made industrialist Dan Packard (Wallace Beery), who’s going around to the other shareholders of the Jordan Line shipping company and using a front man to buy them out. Oliver is also being treated for a mysterious illness by Dr. Wayne Talbot (Edmund Lowe), who unbeknownst to his long-suffering wife Lucy (Karen Morley) is having an affair with Dan Packard’s trophy-wife Kitty (Jean Harlow), whom he visits regularly under the pretext of ministering to her (imaginary) illnesses. (Schreiber theorists would no doubt make a good deal of the fact that, eight years before Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote a script featuring the raucous-voiced blonde bimbo wife of a tycoon who’s bored with their social isolation and spends her days doing jigsaw puzzles in bed.)

The connections get even more tenuous and arbitrary: one of the invited guests to the Jordan dinner is retired actress Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler, top-billed and giving a surprisingly poignant and understated performance in a role quite different from her trademark parts in Tillie’s Punctured Romance and Min and Bill), who’s staying in the same hotel as burned-out silent film star Larry Renault (John Barrymore), who’s having an affair with the Jordans’ daughter Paula (Madge Evans) even though he’s over twice his age — there’s a marvelous passage in which he’s trying to convince her that their relationship won’t last because “you’re 21 and I’m forty-sev- — I’m almost 40” — and has three ex-wives and a long list of ex-girlfriends in between. Larry is in New York to attempt a comeback on the stage, only the producer who was set to put on the play drops out and his replacement is only willing to consider him in a bit role instead of the star part. All this is explained by Larry’s agent, Max Kane (Lee Tracy — Charles was surprised to see his name before the title, not realizing just how big a star he was until he literally pissed his career away on the location for Viva Villa! in Mexico, urinating on a company of Mexican soldiers from his hotel-room balcony and getting the entire company ejected from the country and himself and the original director, Howard Hawks, fired from the film), who brings the new producer to Larry’s hotel room only to see the faded star attack the man verbally in a display of divo temperament he can’t afford either financially or psychologically at the moment.

John Barrymore’s plot line is by far the most poignant, moving and memorable part of this film — even though one has to feel sorry for the real-life John Barrymore being forced to act a role so unnervingly close to the way his own career disintegrated in a wash of temperament, ill-advised romances and the alcohol both he and his character used to try to drown their sorrows. The writers are merciless in stripping away his last vestiges of both personal and professional pride — in the end he’s reduced to giving a hotel bellboy his cufflinks, belt buckle and a silver picture frame and asking him to pawn them and use the money to buy him more booze — and when he’s told by his agent that his career is over and by a typically unctuous movie hotel manager that he’ll have to vacate the room immediately, he responds by closing the doors to the room, using his dinner clothes to seal up the cracks and gazing longingly at the fireplace. At first it looked like he was going to plug up the chimney, light a fire and kill himself via smoke inhalation, but it turns out the fire has a gas jet (I didn’t realize they made gas fireplaces in 1933, just as The Affairs of Martha showed a radio remote control in 1942 and White Heat showed the police using an early version of a cell phone in 1949), and Cukor and cinematographer William Daniels film Barrymore’s suicide almost like a love scene, in romantic half-light and with Barrymore’s face assuming a surprisingly beatific expression as he settles in an armchair for his date with oblivion. (Interestingly, when David O. Selznick was preparing a list of previous movie suicides to defend his decision to have Norman Maine off himself at the end of A Star Is Born against protests from the Production Code Administration, the list he came up with included Lowell Sherman’s suicide in What Price Hollywood?, John Barrymore’s in Dinner at Eight and Garbo’s in Anna Karenina — all films Selznick himself had produced.)

Aside from the John Barrymore plot line, Dinner at Eight rather creaks to its conclusion — this is one movie that thoroughly betrays its stage origins even though it’s technically assured and doesn’t have the crudities of earlier sound films — as the various issues get resolved: Oliver Jordan turns out to be fatally ill (so, as in Grand Hotel, John Barrymore is dead before the movie ends while Lionel is alive, but under a medical death sentence, at the fadeout — and once again it’s interesting to note that here, as in so many 1930’s movies, a doctor is shown carefully concealing the terminal nature of his patient’s illness from the patient, a far cry from the practice of modern doctors who seem almost too anxious to rub in the bad news!), but at least his shipping line is saved, thanks to timely blackmail from Kitty Packard, who threatens to dish the dirt on her husband to the media and sandbag his political aspirations if he goes through with his corrupt deal to take Jordan’s company away from him. The famous exchange between Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow that seems to turn up in every documentary on Harlow or MGM in the 1930’s — the one in which Harlow says she’s been reading a book (“Reading a book?” Dressler thunders in astonishment, rearing her head back for a classic double-take of the kind she was doing in her Sennett days) — “a crazy kind of book” whose author says “machines are going to take the place of every human profession,” to which Dressler replies, “That is something you need never worry about, my dear” — is actually the very last bit of dialogue in the movie, just before the characters exit through the doors to the Jordans’ dining room, the doors close in our face and the MGM “The End” title is superimposed over them.

Dinner at Eight is a bit slow-moving and creaky in spots, and (even more than Grand Hotel did) it rather loses its dramatic raison d’etre after John Barrymore’s suicide, but it’s an engaging movie and a triumph of MGM “class” filmmaking, though it’s indicative of MGM’s take on things that the Depression is depicted here only in terms of its effect on rich people. It’s the force that’s driving multigenerational businesses like the Jordan Line to the brink of bankruptcy and giving nouveau riche bottom-feeders like Wallace Beery’s character a chance to pick off their assets. Indeed, aside from various servants and maids (including a hauntingly sad-faced actress who plays the maid to Jean Harlow’s character and, it’s hinted, is hoping to replace her as the next Mrs. Packard), the lower 90 percent of the socioeconomic scale doesn’t exist at all in this film. Also worthy of note is that the song “Dinner at Eight,” though contemporaneous with the film, isn’t heard in it, nor is it based on the background music (there’s an unwittingly funny moment in which we see the five-piece Hungarian ensemble Millicent Jordan has hired to provide music at her dinner, and as soon as we cut away from them the sound on the soundtrack swells to that of the entire MGM studio orchestra); like the song “I Cover the Waterfront,” it was written to promote a film but otherwise had nothing to do with it. — 6/16/06