| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A+ |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A |
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Where's the dinner?
by Rye. (movies profile)
Sep 28, 2006
A David O. Selznick production. Drama/comedy featuring various socialites involved in a lavish dinner party as based on the play by Pulitzer Prize wining authors George Kaufman and Edna Ferber.
Millicent Jordan [Billie Burke] plans another societal occasion to aid her husband Oliver [Lionel Barrymore] business, with the plan of honoring a couple of British aristocrats. When guests keep canceling her shindig, Millicent resourcefully turns to the avoided exceptions, in a last -minute hope of filling the empty spaces at the dinner table. Washed-up veteran stage actress and long time friend of the family Carlotta Vance [Marie Dressler] pushes herself into the party, in the most scruple-less of ways. Millicent is urged by her husband to include Dan Packard [Wallace Berry], a country-bookie miner turned millionaire with a brutish styled attitude and his immature wife Kitty [Jean Harlow], a spoiled attention grabbing simpleton, who aims to use the party as means of climbing the social ladder to fame. Unknowingly to her, Millicent very young daughter Paula [Madge Evans] continues a rugged affair with an out of work aged actor Larry Renault [John Barrymore], who happens to be also invited. The family doctor Wayne Talbot [Edmund Lowe] and his over-zealous wife Mrs. Talbot [Karen Morley], completes this most extravagant guest list.
Facing bankruptcy in his business wherein Oliver Jordan suffers with major health complications, he hides this secret from his family. Carlotta Vance, who once courted Oliver when he was younger, brought stocks in a business venture from him a long time ago. Carlotta absent-minded as she is, sells the stocks to Dan Packard. Dan’s trickery is lamented by his wish to see Oliver’s business crumble. Kitty despises her husband, as she continues a heated affair with the mild-mannered doctor Wayne Talbot, whose wife happened to know by the way. Deep in love Paula Jordan features in an extra-marital affair with Larry Renault, whose age is the detriment of a fallen career. Larry drinks his sorrow away, as he succumbs to a penniless lifestyle. What will a frustrated Millicent Jordon do with such a flamboyant guest list? So now the menu changes when the cook accidentally throws the food on the ground, the butler and the chauffer fights, as one ends up in prison whilst the other is in jail. Not to mention that the guests of honor cancelled the dinner party, to instead go to a fishing trip!
In viewing, one would think that George Cukor’s [A Bill of Divorcement] excellent direction is that of experience, one would not know that Cukor was now starting his career, a career that is noted as one of the best motion picture director in American cinema. Cukor’s expertise is rendered with overseeing a hugely talented cast receives balanced scene time. The cast can’t be pointed by a singular performance, as each member subject an almost flawless orchestration of seasoned stage acting. The developed comical sequences are polished in a way used by Frank Capra. Cukor smartly utilizes each actor in there given roles, where be it the character be charming or a miserable gruff. The movie trademarked a style of Edmund Goulding’s ‘Grand Hotel’, released a year earlier, wherein a large talented cast is entwined in a gripping story.
Actors Wallace Berry and Jean Harlow countless feuding on screen, is continued off camera. It is rumored that both actors found it hard to get along while filming. Known as the Hollywood’s first blonde bombshell, with only a handful of movies Jean Harlow was plagued with kidney failure. She collapsed on the set while filming the movie Saratoga [1937], at the tender age of 26 she died of cerebral swelling, the complications due to kidney failure. |
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