May
2002
Now
Playing At The Adelphia-Astoria
Grand
Hotels - On Film And Right Here
By Issy Chaplin
"You
know, every now and then something big happens in this town,"
observes Adam Jeffers, proprietor of the Adelphia-Astoria Theater,
the last of Trenton's grand old movie palaces. "And when
it does, it makes you proud. I hear Mr. Marriott himself is coming
to visit. Imagine that."
What
Jeffers is talking about, of course, is the opening of the Lafayette
Yard Hotel and Conference Center, located just a block from Jeffers'
big screen. "All this hullabaloo about the new hotel made
me want to be a part of it," he says, motioning to the shining
marquee that looms above the West Hanover Street sidewalk, where
Welcome to Trenton is spelled out in the largest plastic letters
Jeffers has.
In
honor of the Marriott's grand opening, "just a hop skip and
a jump," as Jeffers puts it, from the aroma of hot buttered
popcorn that makes the Adelphia-Astoria Trenton's elegy to times
gone by, Jeffers is showing the 1932 film Grand Hotel for the
entire month. "Normally, I'd run at least a double feature,
but I had a vision for the marquee," he says.
At
this he smiles proudly at the marquee, where his Welcome to Trenton
shines on the first line, followed by the words Grand Hotel on
the second.
A
classic of Hollywood's Golden Age, Grand Hotel chronicles the
lives of tenants in a gleaming art-deco hotel in Berlin. The film
stars Greta Garbo as a Russian ballerina who yearns for home,
John Barrymore as a gambler turned thief, Joan Crawford as an
ambitious but appealing stenographer who dreams of being in the
movies, Lionel Barrymore as a dying man enjoying a final fling,
and Wallace Beery as a ruthless, but desperate, industrialist.
The
film, based on Vicki Baum's novel Menschen, is a group portrait
of another time and place. It garnered an academy award for best
picture, is considered one of the first "all-star" productions
of it's kind. In addition to offering stand out performances from
its glittering cast (Greta Garbo, its biggest star at the time,
tends to overact though she looks marvelous walking across the
lobby in that chinchilla), Grand Hotel remains the ultimate in
Depression-era romance.
"Nobody
watched movies like this for the story back then," observes
Jeffers. "They went to escape hard times, to visit a better
place. Isn't that what a good hotel is all about?"
At
the film's beginning, the bored in-house physician, played by
Lewis Stone, bemoans life at the Grand Hotel.
"People
come, people go," he says, "and nothing ever happens."
Of course, he's wrong: in Grand Hotel, life is lived with a capital
"L." People yearn, love, scheme, live, and die. It's
a point not lost on Adam Jeffers.
"Some
people say the same thing about Trenton," he chuckles. "People
say nothing ever happens here." He bends down to scrape a
chewing-gum wrapper from the sidewalk.
"Well,
that just ain't so," he says.
Issy
Chaplin is a Trenton native, now working in the Department of
Taxation.
