The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
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68 films that influenced The Grand Budapest Hotel
What critics say influenced The Grand Budapest Hotel
The references are multitudinous, and come from everywhere (one of my favorites is a cable car sequence nodding to Carol Reed's 1940 thriller "Night Train To Munich").
His favorite is a reference to Night Train To Munich .
The scenes set aboard the funicular railway resemble the climax of Carol Reed's "Night Train to Munich."
While the references to everything from Ernst Lubitsch to Grand Hotel pile up, you forget it’s all taking place against a background of rising Hitlerism and postwar communism that means half of the staff and guests at the Grand Budapest Hotel will fall to ruin before the hotel does.
If you’ve seen Grand Hotel, or Grand Illusion, or The Earrings of Madame de…, you’ll appreciate the loving sense of homage.
Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel and several Ernst Lubitsch films have been cited by Anderson as key influences.
Rather than having anything in common with Zweig’s writings, it is much more of a mash-up of “Grand Hotel” and the Marx Brother’s “Duck Soup”, the comedy set in the fictional European nation of Freedonia that is threatened by an invasion from its neighbor Sylvania.
Now joining such immortal movie hotels as the Grand Hotel (“Grand Hotel”), the Hotel del Coronado (“Some Like It Hot”), the Plaza (“North by Northwest”), the Overlook Hotel (“The Shining”) and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (ditto) is the Grand Budapest Hotel, an art nouveau palace with a pink-icing facade perched where eagles dare somewhere in the Matra Mountains of Hungary.
(Is it a coincidence that this is the same year that MGM's all-star Best Picture winner Grand Hotel was released?)
That leads to a madcap pursuit also involving Captain Henckels (Edward Norton) of the proto-fascist military police (with a character name certainly meant to recall Hynkel of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”); a prison break led by a brooding convict named Ludwig (Harvey Keitel); the intervention of a secret society of master concierges (among whose members are Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens, Waris Ahluwalia and Wally Wolodarsky); a surrealistically funny ski-and-toboggan chase, ending with a homage to Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”; and a gun battle at the hotel itself.
Thomson delivers a crushingly harsh verdict on Anderson’s film: “It relates to the atmosphere and texture of Stefan Zweig like an achingly sweet pastry on a tin plate at Auschwitz-Birkenau.” There’s a long, complex debate to be had on the question of whether it is appropriate or adequate to view the horrors of modern history through a lens of humor or indeed whimsy—a debate that would have to span from To Be or Not to Be and The Great Dictator to their echo in the Zig-Zag militia in The Grand Budapest Hotel .
As the 1932 storyline comes to a close, the fictional Zubrowka is invaded entirely by a Nazi-like army (calling for immediate comparisons with Ernst Lubitsch‘s To Be or Not To Be, Powell and Pressburger‘s A Matter of Life and Death, and Charlie Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator; esteemed company it certainly earns).
Movies like “The Great Dictator” and “To Be or Not To Be” lampooned Nazis with forceful satire.
Other shots, those of death squads as seen from the inside of a train, are reminiscent of earlier Hitchcock films from his between-the-wars British period, particularly "Sabotage."
Anderson names "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Sabotage" and "Torn Curtain" as specific inspirations.
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Zubrowka, the film tells us, was "once the seat of an empire," and so "The Grand Budapest Hotel" harks to the first decade or so of sound cinema, an era of Hollywood comedies, romances and musicals set in quaint and elaborate mythical or Americanized European countries; sample titles include Rouben Mamoulian's "Love Me Tonight" (1932), "Swiss Miss" (1938) with Laurel and Hardy, and such operetta-inspired Ernst Lubitsch productions as "The Smiling Lieutenant" and "The Merry Widow."
Zubrowka, the film tells us, was "once the seat of an empire," and so "The Grand Budapest Hotel" harks to the first decade or so of sound cinema, an era of Hollywood comedies, romances and musicals set in quaint and elaborate mythical or Americanized European countries; sample titles include Rouben Mamoulian's "Love Me Tonight" (1932), "Swiss Miss" (1938) with Laurel and Hardy, and such operetta-inspired Ernst Lubitsch productions as "The Smiling Lieutenant" and "The Merry Widow."
In fact, the only direct reference to classic Hollywood I caught was an usherette dressed in the same costume — right down to cape and neon wand — as worn by Margaret Sullavan in a Budapest movie palace in William Wyler’s The Good Fairy (1935).
The Grand Budapest Hotel is spry and sly, with tickling tributes to cinematic forebearers; there’s a sequence lifted whole cloth from Hitchcock that, no lie, made me clap in my seat, while a mountaintop set-piece put me in mind of both Black Narcissus and the 1941 Goofy short “The Art of Skiing.”
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That leads to a madcap pursuit also involving Captain Henckels (Edward Norton) of the proto-fascist military police (with a character name certainly meant to recall Hynkel of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”); a prison break led by a brooding convict named Ludwig (Harvey Keitel); the intervention of a secret society of master concierges (among whose members are Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens, Waris Ahluwalia and Wally Wolodarsky); a surrealistically funny ski-and-toboggan chase, ending with a homage to Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”; and a gun battle at the hotel itself.
Now joining such immortal movie hotels as the Grand Hotel (“Grand Hotel”), the Hotel del Coronado (“Some Like It Hot”), the Plaza (“North by Northwest”), the Overlook Hotel (“The Shining”) and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (ditto) is the Grand Budapest Hotel, an art nouveau palace with a pink-icing facade perched where eagles dare somewhere in the Matra Mountains of Hungary.
Anderson names "The Lady Vanishes," "The 39 Steps," "Sabotage" and "Torn Curtain" as specific inspirations.
The visualization of the sequence pulls elements from a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain."