Academy Award for Best Picture

1931/32

Grand Hotel

Release dates

April 12, 1932

Starring

Greta Garbo

John Barrymore

Joan Crawford

Wallace Beery

Lionel Barrymore

Lewis Stone

Jean Hersholt

Grand Hotel is a 1932 American drama film directed by Edmund Goulding. The screenplay by William A. Drake and Béla Balázs is based on the 1930 play of the same title by Drake, who had adapted it from the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum. As of 2014, the film is the only one to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture without it or its participants being nominated in any other category.

The film was remade as Week-End at the Waldorf in 1945, and also served as the basis for the 1989 stage musical of the same title. During the 1970s, a remake, to be set at Las Vegas' MGM Grand Hotel, was considered. In 2007, Grand Hotel was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The line "I want to be alone," famously delivered by Greta Garbo, placed #30 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes.

The phrase "Grand Hotel theme" came to be used for any dramatic movie following the activities of various people in a large busy place, with some of the characters' lives overlapping in odd ways and some of them remaining unaware of one another's existence. Such "grand hotel" films have been set at airports, aboard ocean liners, in large department stores, etc., as well as in hotels. Neil Simon used the format in both play and film versions of Plaza Suite, California Suite, and London Suite.