Grand Hotel and the Ensemble Movie and Story

Recently I joined an online community called Hotel Film Club where the volunteers who join agree to watch a series of movies. The first movie on the list, scheduled for today, October 26, is Grand Hotel (1932). This picture is an ensemble picture or it has an ensemble cast. Wikipedia defines the term as follows.

an ensemble cast is one which is composed of multiple principal actors and performers who are typically assigned roughly equal amounts of screen time.

While watching the movie, I was struck by the thought that not very many pictures have ensemble casts.

One question that might be asked is why there are not many ensemble movies. In fiction, I would not say that this method is not the dominant method of storytelling, but it is not entirely uncommon. Certainly, ensemble novels are more common than ensemble movies. Spending just a few minutes looking, I found a list of 99 ensemble novels on goodreads and a list of 32 recent young adult novels on another site. Two excellent recent books that might be described as ensemble novels come to mind. 

The first novel is Pachinko. In 2017 Lee Min-jin published Pachinko which follows multiple members of the same family through time. The wikipedia entry on the book says

Pachinko is the second novel by Harlem-based author and journalist Min Jin Lee. Published in 2017, Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.

Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Apple Inc.'s streaming service Apple TV+ produced a television adaptation of the novel and it was released in March 2022

I will note that even the wikipedia editor uses the word ensemble.

In 2018, Tommy Orange published the ensemble novel There There. Here is the wikipedia summary:

There There is the debut novel by Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange. Published in 2018, the book follows a large cast of Native Americans living in the Oakland, California area and contains several essays on Native American history and identity. The characters struggle with a wide array of challenges, ranging from depression and alcoholism, to unemployment, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the challenges of living with an "ambiguously nonwhite" ethnic identity in the United States. All of the characters unite at a community powwow and its attempted robbery.

The book explores the themes of Native peoples living in urban spaces (Urban Indians), and issues of ambivalence and complexity related to Natives' struggles with identity and authenticity. There There was favorably received, and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.^[4] The book was also awarded a Gold Medal for First Fiction by the California Book Awards. 

The editor did not use the word ensemble, but they did use the term "a large cast." 

There There and Pachinko are just two of the many ensemble novels that have been published. It was easy to find them. However, it was much more difficult to identify ensemble movies.

Despite the fact that ensemble movies are not common, there have been some very good ones made. Among the better known recent movies that have ensemble casts one might include Six Degrees of Separation and Crash. 

Having spent some time describing how uncommon ensemble movies are, I would like to spend the rest of this entry briefly describing four of them -- two made by Jacques Demy and two made by Robert Altman.

 

The French director Jacques Demy -- along with his wife Agnes Varda -- was one of the best and most important progenitors of the New Wave. He made many great pictures, but I would like to talk about two of them: Lola and The Young Girls of Rochefort.

At least in my opinion, Lola is a good place to start when watching the films of Jacques Demy. Lola, played by Anouk Aimee, is a single mother who is now working as a cabaret dancer as a way of supporting her son. Jonathan Rosenbaum described the movie as follows:

Jacques Demy’s first and in some ways best feature (1961, 90 min.), shot in exquisite black-and-white ‘Scope by Raoul Coutard, is among the most neglected major works of the French New Wave. Abandoned by her sailor lover, a cabaret dancer (Anouk Aimee) brings up their son while awaiting his return and ultimately has to choose among three men. Chock-full of film references (to The Blue Angel, Breathless, Hollywood musicals, and the work of Max Ophuls, among other things) and lyrically shot in Nantes, the film is a camera stylo love letter, and Michel Legrand’s lovely score provides ideal nostalgic accompaniment.

The Young Girls of  Rochefort is my personal favorite film that Jacques Demy made. On the Criterion website, Jonathan Rosenbaum has a good essay about the film. He writes

Young Girls is, of course, a French musical, not simply an effort to duplicate a Hollywood one. It was shot on location in Rochefort, is intricately and beautifully scored by Michel Legrand (with lyrics by Demy), and features many of the key players in French cinema at the time: Catherine Deneuve costars as Delphine, playing a twin to her real-life older sister, Françoise Dorléac (as Solange), in what would be their only film together (Dorléac died in a car accident a few months after the movie opened); Danielle Darrieux (the star of The Earrings of Madame de . . .) is the twins’ mother, Yvonne, and the only cast member who does her own singing; Michel Piccoli, the hero of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, plays Yvonne’s long-lost lover, the unfortunately named Simon Dame (which would have made her “Madame Dame”); and Jacques Perrin—who subsequently became an important French producer as well as a writer and director—is cast as Maxence, a sailor and artist whose imagined and painted “feminine ideal” is in fact Delphine, a woman he’s never met but who lives only a few blocks away.

It is worth your time to read the entire essay in which Rosenbaum explains why he believe some critics misunderstood the picture when it was released.

Having said a few words about Jacques Demy, let us now move on to Robert Altman.

Robert Altman, to me, personified the ensemble movie since he made so many of them. Two of them stand out for me: A Prairie Home Companion and Nashville.

A Prairie Home Companion was the last movie Altman made before he died. I saw the movie on the big screen in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria in 2007 with my friend and colleague at the American University in Bulgaria at the time, Diego Lucci.  I loved the movie and thought it was hilarious. However, I had heard the radio show many times and Diego had never heard a single episode. Diego grew up in Naples, Italy and just did not understand the humor and was a little bored. I suppose the lesson is that humor is often situated in a particular set of experiences.

The movie is sort of a film version of the radio show that aired with Garrison Keillor as its host from 1974 until 2016 and, in a somewhat different form as Live From Here until 2020. The film focuses on the final performance of the show, which is recorded live, before the theater is to be torn down to be replaced by a parking lot, which, I suppose is a truly American story. The cast includes both scenes on stage and back stage in a way that reminded me of the television show The Muppet Show. Both the Muppet Show and the movie A Prairie Home Companion have a large ensemble cast and things back stage always seem on the verge of disaster while, on stage, the show somehow goes on without any major disasters.

In his review, Roger Ebert provides an idea of how large the cast in the movie is:

The show is hosted by a man referred to as G.K., and played by Garrison Keillor as a version of himself, which is about right, because he always seems to be a version of himself. Keillor, whose verbal and storytelling genius has spun a whole world out of thin air, always seems a step removed from what he does, as if bemused to find himself doing it. Here his character refuses to get all sentimental about the last program, and has a dialogue with Lola (Lindsay Lohan), a young poet who likes suicide as a subject. It seems to her G.K. should offer up a eulogy; there is sufficient cause, not only because of the death of the program, but because a veteran of the show actually dies during the broadcast.

"I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else," he says.

"You don't want to be remembered?"

"I don't want them to be told to remember me."

So the last show is treated like any other. In the dressing room, incredibly cluttered with bric-a-brac and old photos, we meet Lola's mother and her aunt, Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin). They are the two survivors from a four-sister singing act: "The Carter Family was like us, only famous." Their onstage duets are hilarious, depending on a timing that rises above the brilliant to the transcendent; they were doing this double act on the Academy Award telecast last March.

We also meet Chuck Akers (L. Q. Jones), an old-time C&W singer, and Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), two cowboy singers who threaten to make the last program endless as they improvise one corny joke after another. We also meet the people who make the show work: The stage manager Molly (Maya Rudolph), and, borrowed from the show itself, the makeup lady (Sue Scott), Al the backstage guy (Tim Russell), the sound effects man (Tom Keith), the bandleader (Rich Dworsky) and the P.H.C. house band. Molly is surely so pregnant she should stay calm, but she is driven to distraction by G.K.'s habit of never planning anything, and moseying up to the microphone at the last conceivable moment.

 Can I just say that I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert and I miss them both.

Altman's best movie, at least in my opinion, is Nashville. The late Roger Ebert reviewed the picture in his great movies series. In his review, Ebert highlights the ensemble nature of Nashville:

Because Altman himself effortlessly swims in a sea of friends and associates, he finds it easy to make movies that do the same thing, and what's amazing is not how many characters there are in "Nashville" (more than 25 significant speaking roles) but how many major characters. To get into this movie at all is to be given scenes of weight and depth, so that your character makes an impression. And there are not just many characters but many themes. It is easy to follow the political commentary in the film (Hal Philip Walker's campaign could stand for all the dissidents since, from Jesse Ventura to Ralph Nader). More subtle is a thread that examines country music lyrics as they apply to the lives of the characters.

As I said earlier, it is not difficult to find other examples of ensemble novels. However, this narrative technique is far less common in motion pictures. I might suggest one reason for the fact that not many ensemble movies have been made is that movies are sold, in large part, on their cast. Actors are, to the financial backers of a picture, worth their weight in gold. 

To put this idea another way, actors like to have "star parts". In the extras that come with the Criterion release of The Third Man, Peter Bogdanovich describes a conversation he had with Orson Welles about Welles' part in the picture. Welles told Bogdanovich that the part of Harry Lime was a "star part." Take a look.

 

So, I suppose that the answer I will settle on in an attempt to answer the question of why ensemble movies are not more common is that people -- especially actors, but audiences as well -- like star parts.