Review: "Weekend at the Waldorf" (1945)

Over the holidays the wife and I caught up on a movie we'd DVR'd from TCM: the 1945 all-star ensemble comedy Weekend at the Waldorf.

Remember a few years ago there was a batch of romantic comedies with all-star ensemble casts like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, New Year's Eve, and a bunch of others? Well, those movies were clearly inspired by movies like this one. In fact, Weekend at the Waldorf was an inspired update of another all-star ensemble classic from 1932: Grand Hotel, set in Berlin, during the Weimar Republic.

The movie, obviously, takes place at the famous hotel in NYC during the last days of WW2. The war is ever present in this otherwise lighthearted movie, with people either coming back from, or headed to, the various battle fronts. This movie, like Grand Hotel, has all the elements: the crooked businessman, the dying man, the scoundrel, the ambitious and beautiful secretary, the exhausted-and-just-wants-to-get-away-from-it-all movie star, plus an array of goofy characters. Their lives and stories intersect over this one weekend at the Waldorf Astoria, and the movie is a lot of good classic movie fun with great writing and scenes.

The movie stars Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Robert Benchley, and Keenan Wynn. Most people today have probably never heard of any of them but they were big starts 75 years ago and they are all clearly having a lot of fun working together.

It's definitely worth checking out if it ever winds up on TCM again.