Week-End at the Waldorf (1945)

This lavish overlong version of Vicki Baum’s play which had previously won the Academy Award for Best Picture as Grand Hotel (1932) is at its best when Ginger Rogers and Walter Pidgeon (in the Greta Garbo-John Barrymore roles) are on the screen. Rogers plays Irene Malvern a lonely career actress who’s in New York for a childhood friend’s wedding and the premiere of her latest movie and Pidgeon plays Chip Collier a war correspondent who needs a restful weekend to recharge his batteries. When the fiancée (Phyllis Thaxter) of Irene’s doctor friend (Warner Anderson) gets jealous of their past relationship and threatens to call off the wedding Irene pretends that Chip who’d been pretending to be a jewel thief to spend time being reformed by the actress is secretly her husband so that the nuptials can proceed. Unfortunately even this storyline sags and the film barely recovers in time for its predictable ending. In other roles Lana Turner plays the hotel’s public stenographer-notary republic Bunny Smith (ala Joan Crawford) and Edward Arnold plays a scheming oilman (not really like Wallace Beery’s character in the original) Martin Edley. Van Johnson plays Captain James Hollis who’s just returned from the war needing an operation to remove some shrapnel from near his heart but who’d lost his best buddy and his will to live (vs. the dying Lionel Barrymore) in the process that is until he meets Bunny.

Filling other roles are Keenan Wynn as a cub reporter learning from Collier to expose Edley’s shading dealings with the Bey of Aribajan an Arab played by George Zucco Robert Benchley as a dog-loving society columnist Leon Ames as Irene’s showbiz manager Henry Burton Samuel Hinds as Edley’s absent boss Mr. Jessup Porter Hall as Edley’s assistant Stevens Rosemary DeCamp as Irene’s traveling maid Irving Bacon as Burton’s assistant Moroni Olsen as the hotel’s house detective Xavier Cugat as himself – he plays a tune ostensibly written by Hollis’s deceased buddy and Byron Foulger (uncredited) as a hotel barber. It was directed by Robert Z. Leonard (The Great Ziegfeld (1936)) with a screenplay by Bella and Sam Spewack (My Favorite Wife (1940)).

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