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“Dinner at Eight” (1933) is a fascinating snapshot of a moment in time.
An early “talkie,” a mid-Great Depression adaptation of a then still fresh and edgy Broadway dramedy, we can look at this ancient George Cukor film and appreciate the topicality, the wit and the many cinematic shortcomings evident in it, stylistic traditions that would fall by the wayside as Hollywood sprinted towards its Golden Age.
It’s stodgy and stagey, a movie burdened by the limitations of sound gear and the dull, lock-the-camera-down technique that inspired. But the dialogue is pre-“Screwball” quick and funny . Well, at times.
It’s “Pre Production Code,” a movie made just as Hollywood was about to morally police its pictures lest governments and censorious church organizations take that job for themselves.
That makes this a showcase for sex symbol Jean Harlow at her peak, a scantily clad “bombshell” who could be hilarious as a dizzy blonde, or a blonde not as dizzy as you might think.
It was the pentultimate film of stage and Oscar-winning screen comedienne Marie Dressler.
No less than two Barrymores, John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, would grace the screen.
And through them, and the machinations of a George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber comical melodrama, we see the seas about to change in the theater and in acting, and in the genre that come to define Depression Era Hollwood — the Screwball Comedy.
It’s 1933, and business is bad, but the well-traveled are still the well-traveled, keeping up appearances.
Oliver Jordan (Lionel Barrymore), owner to the hundred-year-old Jordan (shipping) Line is having to keep ships in port for lack of exports. But dithering, chirping wife Millicent (Billie Burke) all atwitter at the social coup she’s managed, wrangling a couple of wealthy members of the visiting British aristocracy for a dinner party.
She buzzes about the staff and plants invitations with an old family friend, the ancient, well-traveled and well-connected actress Carlotta Vance (Dressler), their society doctor (Edmund Lowe) and his wife (Karen Morley), with the Jordans’ daughter Paul (Madge Evans) and her just-back-from-a-Grand-Tour fiance (Philip Holmes).
As her husband needs business from the rough, new-money Montana tycoon Max Packard (Wallace Beery), he’s invited, along with the gauche lower class young beauty (Harlow) he’s married to.
“You’re joking! Ask that common little woman to my house and that noisy, vulgar man? He smells Oklahoma!”
A late addition? Another actor, struggling, aging matinee idol Larry Renault (John “The Profile” Barrymore).
The twists in all this are that Oliver is deathly ill and is reluctant to tell his family. His doctor (Lowe) is carring on an affair with the platinum blonde Kitty Packard (Harlow). Her cutthroat husband is planning on buying The Jordan Line out from under Oliver behind his back.
Oliver’s daughter Paula is having an affair with the actor Renault, who is a hopeless drunk whose big stage show may not come together for him after all.
And “everybody’s broke,” bitching about the social requirements that translate to the great expense of keeping houses in New York, Florida, the Riviera, London and the like.
Dressler gives us a taste of the grande comedienne of the stage she was and how that translated to screen presence, best appreciated in silent comedies with Chaplin and Marion Davies. But she had a late career talkie revival in popularity that won her an Oscar and put her back in demand. She gives us moments of subtlety and broad gestures straight out of 19th century melodrama — a lot of facial mugging that had her over-made-up eyebrows bouncing along to a performance that had little to do with the dialogue coming out of her mouth.
“I belong to the Delmonico period. A table at the window, looking out on Fifth Avenue. Boxes with flowers in. Pink lampshades. String orchestra. And, I don’t know, yes, yes, willow blooms. Inverness capes. Dry champagne. And snow on the ground.”
Burke, aka Mrs. Florenz Zeigfeld, reminds us why her turn as Glenda the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz” made her high-pitched, upper class chirp one of the era-defining voices on the screen. Every time she opens her mouth it’s worth a giggle.
Lionel Barrymore was a few years from taking the turn toward the grumpy old men character roles (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Key Largo”) that we remember him for.
His brother Barrymore, a great Edwardian actor and great drunk great at playing a drunk, registers. Beery is all bluster, self-importance and the threat of violence as Packard.
But Harlow just pops, and not just because of Cukor’s gooey, gauzy soft-focus closeups. She’s got a louche look, a sexually self-confident air and a sass that she turns on the minute her lout of a husband gives her cause, such as suggesting Roosevelt might put him in the cabinet in Washington.
“Nertz! You’re not going to drag me down to that graveyard. I seen their pictures in the papers, those girlies. A lot of sour-faced frumps with last year’s clothes on. Pinning medals on girl scouts and pouring tea for the DARs and rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn.”
The film’s theatricality, built out of a series of intimate, serio-comic scenes, and some of its dialogue date it firmly in the “before talking picture cameras moved” and “before dialogue got snappy” era. It’s static, and its turns towards the melodramatic are daring only in that the coming Production Code would frown upon alcoholism, infidelity, suicide, bare-backed bra-lessness and dialogue leaning towards “son of a…”
But it’s a classic of its type and its era, a fine moment-in-time look at the theater in the fourth year of the Depression, the first year under Roosevelt and the cinema just as it was about to get a lot quicker, punchier and wittier.
“You know, my skin’s terribly delicate and I don’t dare expose it.”
Rating: TV-PG, today, pre-code in 1933
Cast: Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke, Jean Harlowe, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Edmund Lowe, Jean Herscholt, Lee Tracy and John Barrymore
Credits: Directed by George Cukor, scripted by Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on the play by George. S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. An MGM release.
Running time: 1:51