The classic 1933 setup could not be grander. George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote a Broadway depression drama, here translated into a black and white film centering on the lives of the people invited to a formal dinner which the wife isn't capable of pulling off, and for which the husband doesn't exactly have enthusiasm. The one liners about the old rich losing everything in the depression, to believe all is over, are magnificent. The film is a milestone in the number of high paying stars the producer was willing to hire in the early days of the talkies -John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Billie Burke and Marie Dressler. While everything clicked gloriously during the premiere year, 1933, the millennium finds both the photography and the editing VERY dated and more the sense of the major characters developing their backstories and depression dilemmas as sequential short plays, one after the other having nothing to do with each other, than a storyline per se. It seems more like watching a series of fabulous old clips featuring this or that famous star in this or that realistic loss of self and wealth situation, but not anything which the modern audience might suggest approaches "a play with a story".
Review of Dinner at Eight
