Hotel Berlin (1945)

HOTEL BERLIN  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Peter Godfrey
    Raymond Massey, Helmut Dantine, Faye Emerson,
    Peter Lorre, Andrea King, Alan Hale,
    George Colouris, Henry Daniell, Peter Whitney
"Hotel Berlin" is like "Grand Hotel" acted by supporting players instead of an A-list cast. It's from a novel by the same writer (Vicki Baum), and the setting again is a German luxury hotel. The war's drawing to a close now, and the Third Reich's brutal years in power and its imminent downfall affect everything. The movie was rushed through post-production because the producers feared the war would end before its release, and there's a sense of things being open-ended, issues not entirely resolved. The second-tier casting pays off, especially for the opportunity it gives Daniell as a soft-spoken aristocrat with a hand in everybody's story and an eye toward his own escape, and Lorre as a scientist crippled by guilt and cowering behind a curtain of cynicism, alcohol and cigarette smoke.