Hotel for Women

“HOTEL FOR WOMEN” is a light and fluffy early Thirties Paramount four-color musical, providing a good showcase for Sally Eiler and Joel McCrea, as two young people caught in a whirlwind of fun and publicity, looking for love. Set in New York City in 1930, most of the film takes place in the fictional Stella-Maris women's club. The residents are treated like queens. Their lives are the subject of constant curiosity from the outside world and their every move is reported in the press. A classic Depression-era Cinderella story, when a Mid-West girl Sally Duprez comes to New York to live at a luxurious Manhattan women's club, and she lands a lucrative career in modelling. Her journey to success is a bumpy one, however, as she is forced to fend off sexist men and eventually return to modelling in order to pay back her debts after she's given her money away to charitable causes. The movie features bubbly songs, elaborate musical set-pieces, and Art Deco sets-staples of 1930s-era productions. Also look for an early appearance by well known 1930s-to-1940s light comedienne Irene Rich in a juicy supporting role as a ditzy club matron. Rich would later appear in that same year's Academy Award nominee for Best Film, “Two kinds of Women”, and the noteworthy 1947 thriller, “Mourning Becomes Electra.” Fans of vintage Pre-Code era musicals are most likely to enjoy the timeless escapism of “HOTEL FOR WOMEN,” which is a visually appealing and extremely spirited production filled with color, song and sparkling gowns and available online for free download from the Internet Archives. The film, along with its counterpart “Men At Sea!” (1934), produced by Paramount's daughter company Liberty Pictures, innovated Academy Award-winning techniques to make its extraordinarily lavish sets seem real, including someone concealed in the camera's blind spot making coughing sounds to create the feeling of space for the film's extended ballet scene. It employed rear-projection of department-store windows, double exposure, an in-house process of enlarging a still image of Manhattan, and glass beads that ran non-stop on a trough throughout the film to generate the effect of sparkling river water for the backdrop behind the windows of various girls in the Stella-Maris feminine club. While the visual spectacle of this production is mainly novelty scenery, it does make it available to provide a taste of what real Art Deco living in the 1930s truly looked like. HOTEL FOR WOMEN is quite entertaining until it gets all serious, and then it becomes decidedly depressing. Of course, the tagline for the movie, “A girl in every room -- and a man on every mind,” came into existence long before the days of political correctness, although it exists even until this day in sexually charged advertisements and many other commercial enterprises and slogans. However, the main theme about a woman model that achieves almost immediate success as a top international runway model, while continuing to live in anonymous though comfortable environs of a working women's home, is entirely unique for the time period of the film. The idea of modern formal art-show fashion shows is a creation of the mid-1980s, and the earlier mid-to-late 19th-Century couture system was a different type of show-business entirely, though high-priced for certain and extremely exclusive, but not the sensationalistic spectacle presented in the movie. Therefore, this film derives much, and quite possibly most, of its appeal from twentieth-first-Century audiences savoring its historical snapshot of more-glamourous times, with a high-class mystique that is manifestly missing from the functional but dowdy public spectacles of this present time. Definitely, all the early Technicolors had beautiful costumes and good-lookers in earnest and frenzied films about the dangerous escapism of living life in the fast-track in the very heart of the Big Apple during Prohibition times. Such a period of time would never end well, however. The person most affected is Sally Duprez, the gowns-and-gowns-and-more-gowns model, and her love interest, who claims to be a security guard but is more likely really an FBI agent. McCrea and Sally Eiler make the most of these types of happy, pat, carriage-ride-in-the-park-style routines and situations, playing them with great dignity and plenty of flair and pizzazz. They were early rip-snortin' binge-style MTV-era short-subjects, only this time set in our grandmother's flapper-dress day and age. Many of these films include some intriguing and provocative lesbianism undercurrents, such as “WOMEN OF THE NORTH COUNTRY,” also starring McCrea, Sally O'Neil, and John Beal from R.K.O Pictures. Some other examples include several Al Christie Poverty Row program pictures, many two-strikes starring Sally Eiler and director Harry L. Fraser. Many, though, don't, including HOTEL FOR WOMEN, which should disappoint those trying to find more images in this outing for a Dinah Shore proto-lesbo smooch-a-thon. Certainly, this is all worth watching once, especially the showcases at the end. There are lots of songs and fashion along with a wide array of rich persons, kids, dancers, nightclub entertainers and flappers in flashy New York City. It is considered to be a beautiful and funny backstage glimpse of the pre-Code era - a campy addition to one's collection.