The hotel
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The hotel |
| Original title | hotel |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1967 |
| length | 124 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 (1967), 12 (today) |
| Rod | |
| Director | Richard Quine |
| script | Wendell Mayes |
| production | Wendell Mayes |
| music | Johnny Keating |
| camera | Charles Lang |
| cut | Sam O'Steen |
| occupation | |
| |
The Hotel is a 1966 American melodrama directed by Richard Quine starring Rod Taylor in the lead role of a young manager of a luxury hotel in New Orleans who has to deal with numerous problems, including saving the venerable property. He is supported by a remarkable international star team, including Catherine Spaak , Melvyn Douglas , Richard Conte , Michael Rennie and Merle Oberon as a British high-nobility couple involved in a car accident and hit-and-run, as well as Karl Malden in a role that is highly unusual for his career as always good cheerful, shrewd hotel thief. The story is based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Hailey , published in 1965 .
action
The venerable New Orleans St. Gregory Hotel of the aged Warren Trent has seen far better days. The pride of bygone days has remained and the service is considered excellent, but the luxury hostel has recently got into dire financial straits due to mismanagement. Young, dynamic new hotel manager Peter McDermott has been hired to save what can be saved. But this is by no means the only problem Peter struggles with. Some guests are even more worried, such as the ducal couple, the Duke, and the Duchess of Lanbourne, who “fled” to St. Gregory's after recently causing a serious car accident without reporting to the police. Other guests, such as a notorious thief who goes into the rooms of the hotel visitors to rob them, are completely unwelcome. And then a certain Curtis O'Keefe turns up, a rabid businessman who tries to put Mr. Trent, via Peter McDermott, under massive pressure to finally sell the old box to him. He wants to strip the St. Gregory of all time-honored charm and transform it into a soulless, fully automated accommodation of the future. This is the starting point in Das Hotel.
O'Keefe heads a modern hotel chain and is determined to include the St. Gregory as a kind of crown jewel in this chain. His French playmate Jeanne Rochefort travels at his side, but McDermott quickly becomes friends with her. Peter realizes that the attractive young lady is not necessarily enthusiastic about the business methods of her lover and gradually relaxes Jeanne in the course of the O'Keefe story. He, in turn, tries to undo the union's support for McDermott's hotel rescue concept. Hotel owner Mr. Trent is without a doubt the weak point of the St. Gregory - a not necessarily unsympathetic but in many ways stuck businessman in yesterday and the day before yesterday. Growing up in a time when an American form of apartheid was also in force in the USA , Mr. Trent once made it his main policy that blacks who want to stay in his luxury hotel should not be billeted in order not to endanger white customers frighten away. And so O'Keefe sends a black couple as agents provocateurs in order to book a suite in the absence of McDermott. The employees promptly follow old Trent's instructions and the colored couple is turned away. The scandal is great and hardly repairable. When McDermott comes back and inspects the PR disaster, he makes serious accusations against his aged boss. Although he can do the blacks, a certain Dr. Elmo Adams and his wife are exposed as agitators, but the damage to their image is so great that under these circumstances the union withdraws its commitment to support. There isn't much more McDermott can do than discovering that “Dr. Adams ”is actually an employee at one of the O'Keefe Hotels.
The Duke of Lanbourne, who has arrived with his wife, is set to become the upcoming British ambassador to the United States and therefore needs no scandal. But since he hit a child in his luxury car and just drove on, he has become vulnerable. The crime has not yet become public, but the unscrupulous hotel detective Dupere has found out about the terrible misconduct and is now blackmailing the noble Englishman for 25,000 US dollars. The Duchess, a beautiful, elegant middle-aged lady, clings to her husband and tries to help. And then there is the long-fingered hotel keycase Milne, who also makes McDermott's life difficult. Nobody in the hotel knows him and nobody knows what the thief looks like. Keycase is a man who hardly speaks and who obviously takes a thieving pleasure in his work. As there is less and less cash in circulation, he prefers to steal credit cards. Finally, all threads come together in an elevator.
Several people got on there, and like the condition of the hotel and some of its amoral protagonists, that of the elevator is also ailing. The thief is on the way down to the foyer with a bulging briefcase, including the $ 25,000 earmarked for the blackmailer Dupere, which the thief had stolen from the Duke's hotel room shortly before, in order to get to the St. Gregory as quickly as possible leave. And also with the new Duke and the Duchess of Lanbourne it goes down. The Duke no longer wants to be vulnerable and blackmailed and has decided to face the police. A young mother and her daughter are also in the lift. It comes as it has to: the elevator gives up the ghost and gets stuck between two floors. For the first time, the hotel thief stops laughing and the other lift guests are gradually overcome by panic. The brakes creak and squeal, the cab jerks. Since the elevator threatens to crash, manager McDermott urges the utmost haste to rescue the passengers from the life-threatening situation with the help of his technicians. One person after the other is released via the emergency exit to the neighboring elevator. The thief and the duke argue over which of them is penultimate and last to leave the ailing elevator. Keycase Milne doesn't want to leave his briefcase behind. Without further ado, the Duke stole his bag and pushed his thief through the hatch after practicing. The crook can barely save himself in the next elevator when the other cabin with the Duke and the $ 25,000 falls down.
The police have arrived at the hotel to investigate the hit and run and are interrogating the Duchess widow. She wants no shadow to fall on her dead husband's vita and claims that she drove the car that ran over the child. As a lady with style, she also denies the question of whether she was blackmailed by Dupere. Old Trent has made a decision too. He realizes that as a fossil it no longer fits into this modern era and will not sell the hotel to O'Keefe or the union, especially since McDermott tells his old boss in O'Keefe's presence that he tried to sell him with 20,000 Bribe dollars to convince Trent to sell to O'Keefe. It also turns out that O'Keefes playmate Jeanne Peter had lured into bed just at the time, when the wrong black couple wanted to check into the hotel, so that McDermott could not prevent this faux pas with the racially motivated rejection. Trent will sell the hotel to the bidder who wants to tear it down completely. Peter McDermott invites the staff and the remaining guests to one last drink before the venerable St. Gregory is closed forever.
Production notes
The shooting of the approximately 3 million dollar film began on May 10, 1966 and ended about two months later, in the early summer of the same year. The exterior shots for The Hotel were shot on-site in New Orleans and the studio shots in Burbank , California. The replica of the hotel interiors, in which the majority of the scenes were created, is said to have cost around $ 325,000. The film premiered on January 19, 1967 in New York. The German premiere was on August 25, 1967, and on June 29, 1975 Das Hotel was shown for the first time on German television ( ARD ).
Cary Odell designed the film structures, Edith Head the robes. George James Hopkins was responsible for the equipment .
Hailey's novel and this film provided the basis for the television series of the same name , which ran on ABC between 1983 and 1988 .
Reviews
In the lexicon of international films it says: “A somewhat old-fashioned film with a large cast of stars, but without any particular depth and convincing portraits of people. It pleases itself in the external effort and colourfulness, but in its inner colorlessness it does not go beyond the conventions of a moderately entertaining social item. "
"The adaptation of another Arthur Hailey novel with different characters is worth no less than 'Airport', but that is only scant praise."
Halliwell's Film Guide found the film to be "an old-fashioned episode melodrama ... pretty brilliantly rendered."
Individual evidence
- ↑ The hotel. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 28, 2019 .
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 482
Web links
- The hotel on Turner Classic Movies
- The hotel in the American Film Institute
- The hotel in the Internet Movie Database (English)