Wes Cravin': The Grand Budapest and its Cinematic Influences

At the Berlinale press conference for The Grand Budapest Hotel’s world premiere in early February, Wes Anderson named several films that served as major influences on his latest effort. These ranged from classics of the screwball comedy genre prevalent in the 1930s and 40s, a musical comedy (Love Me Tonight), a wartime melodrama (The Mortal Storm), and Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence – considered to be one of the great Swedish director’s most oblique and disturbing psychological dramas.

One might also be inclined to suspect Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining informed the production, too, based on some of the set designs combined with certain aspect ratio choices for the cinematography; the star-studded 1932 ensemble piece Grand Hotel – featuring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and John Barrymore – must surely have figured in Anderson's thinking, too, and not just because of its title.

The two screwball comedies Anderson cited are 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner and 1942’s To Be or Not to Be, both directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Like Anderson, the German-American writer-director has preoccupations with lively ensembles, intricate staging and elegant artifice, but his films are also infused with a distinct humanism that garnered the moniker of ‘the Lubitsch touch’. Even within the arguably extravagant, minutely decorated frameworks that characterise films such as Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson always gets across his own palpable sincerity and wistfulness that counter accusations of vapidity levelled at his protagonists. In a quite appropriate choice of programming, coincidental or otherwise, one of Lubitsch’s most praised works Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo, also screens at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, as part of the ‘Hooray for Hollywood' strand that shines a spotlight on 1939’s best picture nominees at the Academy Awards.

This range of films from Lubitsch to Bergman is certainly an eclectic selection of cinematic reference points; that Anderson crafts and channels his own unique, coherent voice out of them is a testament to his talents. The writer-director is a figure who is sometimes blindly derided, falling prey to often facile accusations of making the same film over and over again. While there are certainly motifs that recur throughout his films, at least the ones post-Rushmore, when his budgets and creative control noticeably increased, each progressive work in his filmography is a deepening of established themes and an exploration of new ones.

As critic David Ehrlich asserts in his Berlin review of the new film for the website Badass Digest, Anderson has no interest at this point in his career in “broadening his film universe” and showing his “naysayers that he’s capable of more than they think; Anderson has instead devoted himself to proving the value of what they think he is”. Ehrlich also suggests that the energetic tableau that is The Grand Budapest Hotel can even be read as being “the first Wes Anderson movie that’s about Wes Anderson movies”. For those who would rather not witness what that looks like, you are welcome to check out of this particular hotel; those who stay will likely receive great service.