Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Week-end at the Waldorf

(1945)

Sort of a cut-rate Grand Hotel. In fact, at one point one of the characters compares her situation to a story line from that movie. Robert Benchley narrates a description of the workings of a big luxury hotel, and we follow several stories that don’t necessarily interlock. In fact, at least two of the stories start off and then are just abandoned. The two main ones concern Ginger Rogers as a big Hollywood movie star who’s lonely and Walter Pidgeon as a war correspondent, and Van Johnson as a wounded army officer and Lana Turner as a hotel stenographer. Both end in romance, after a suitable period of denial on the part of Rogers and Turner. It all; struck me as rather routine, not up to Grand Hotel at all.