Dinner at Eight (1933 George Cukor)

David Selznick tried to repeat Thalberg's success with Grand Hotel but with fairly disastrous results. Though played more for laughs, these sit uneasily with drama elements, e.g. John Barrymore's failed actor's suicide. Also the plot lines are oddly inconclusive - Lionel Barrymore is dying, his business is sunk. His daughter Madge Evans professed to be in love with JB, now presumably takes up with fiancee Phillips Holmes again? What of Wallace Beery and his two-timing wife Jean Harlow?

Up until the last twenty minutes there's no music at all. Which (unlike yesterday's Dead End) gives it a creaky feeling like it's older than its predecessor.

'How long ago did we watch this?' Q asked me.
'2007,' I replied.
'There's a reason for that,' was her sage response.

So (to try to find the good) Marie Dressler as (another) washed up actor is quite fun (one of her last performances), Harlow quite amusing trying to fit in with upper crust, the always reliable Beulah Bondi sympathetic as harassed wife trying to organise said dinner.

With Lee Tracy (agent), Edmund Lowe (doctor), Madge Evans (aunt), Jean Hersholt (producer), Karen Morley (doctor's wife), May Robson, Grant Mitchell. Based on a play by Kaufman and Ferber, adapted by Frances Marion and Herman Mankiewicz, with additional dialogue from Donald Ogden Stewart. Shot by Bill Daniels.

The editing (Ben Lewis) is disappointingly extremely slack - this was a couple of years before Margaret Booth became Head of MGM Editing - this wouldn't have happened on her watch.

Died 1937 aged 26

Bit more of this sort of stuff might have helped

I missed the very ending. Harlow says she's been reading a 'nutty book' in which every profession will be replaced by machines. Dressler looks her up and down and says "Oh my dear, that's something you never need worry about."

It was a big hit.