Dinner at Eight

Back to my Jean Harlow film festival: In 1933, Harlow was just one of a number of stars to appear in Dinner at Eight, which is an acknowledged classic from the pre-Code era. Based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, and directed by George Cukor, Dinner at Eight is an ensemble dramedy that swings wildly from farce to tragedy, sometimes in the same scene.

The plot hinges on a dinner party that a socialite (Bille Burke) is throwing in honor of a pair of English peers. Getting them to come is a major coup, so she thinks of nothing but plotting for the party. Her husband, Lionel Barrymore, runs a shipping line that is on the brink of failure. He asks a crude businessman (Wallace Beery) to help him out, but Beery has plans on taking over the line himself.

Beery is married to Harlow, his trophy wife, who does nothing but lounge in bed eating chocolates. She is having an affair with her doctor, and when she and Beery are together their arguments are epic, with some classic insults--blowhard and gas bag are two of her favorite terms for him.

Meanwhile Lionel's old flame, a retired actress (Marie Dressler) comes to New York to visit. She's flamboyant and is also full of zingers that sound Kaufmanesque, such as when a woman tells her she saw her when she was just a girl and Dressler, insulted, says, "You and I must talk about the Civil War sometime."

Rounding out the group is Burke's daughter (Madge Evans), who is affianced to a swell guy, but has entered into a foolish affair with a has-been actor (John Barrymore). He's 47 and a drunk, she's 19, but she loves him. Their scene comes across unpleasantly in today's world, but it's a pleasure to watch Barrymore work. He will later have a breakdown when his agent (Lee Tracy), tired of his arrogance, tells him he's through, and his work his brilliant. There's even some self-referential humor when everyone refers to him as "the Profile," which is what he was known as in real life.

Burke's party has all sorts of obstacles and doesn't come off quite as she pictured it. She's best known as Glinda, Witch of the North, and I don't believe I'd ever seen her in anything else. Just hearing that voice made me keep thinking she'd say, "And Toto, too!" There were no Oscars for supporting performers back then, but it is generally thought that Burke would have won it for this. She has one memorable scene when she tells her husband and daughter that their problems are trivial compared to what she's doing, though she doesn't know how wrong she is.

Everyone is a delight in this film, though. Harlow again plays a brassy dame whom Beery claims he picked up out of the gutter, but she takes no guff from anyone. There's a great sight gag when, at the party, she tells everyone she sunburns easy and has to keep her skin covered, and then turns and show she's wearing a backless dress (it was a pre-Code film, after all). And Dressler is like a force of nature, wearing furs and a black dress and calling everyone "Ducky." The last scene of the film is its most famous, when Harlow tells her she's been reading a book. Dressler gives the greatest double-take in film history, almost falling over, and hears Harlow tell her that they predict that soon machines will be doing everyone's job. Dressler looks her up and down and says, "That's something you'll never have to worry about."