8.5 / 10
Official trailer
The St. Gregory
I loved Hotel. Hotel is a big, handsome, old-fashioned studio picture about a single week in the life of a grand hotel, the St. Gregory in New Orleans, and it moves from one guest’s trouble to the next with the ease of a manager walking his floor.
Rod Taylor plays Peter McDermott, the hotel’s general manager, a capable, decent man trying to keep an elegant old place afloat.
The St. Gregory is losing money. Its owner, Warren Trent, played by Melvyn Douglas, loves it too much to modernize it and is too proud to sell. A ruthless hotel magnate, Curtis O’Keefe, played by Kevin McCarthy, has come to town to buy it and turn it into one more link in his chain.
Around that central fight, the guests bring their own dramas, and McDermott has to handle all of them before the week is out.
That Opening Shot
The film opens with a single long shot that travels across the hotel floor, taking in the lobby, the staff, the guests and the machinery of the place, and it’s the high point of the film. In one unbroken movement, it tells you what the St. Gregory is: busy, elegant, a little faded and full of stories.
Openings like this make you settle into your seat. Before a single plot point arrives, you know the building, you know its rhythm and you know that the film is going to take its time and enjoy its setting. Director Richard Quine clearly loved the hotel as much as Trent does, and the camera shows it.
For Writers
One long, unbroken shot across the hotel floor opens the film. Before any plot begins, the audience already knows the place, its rhythm and its tone.
An opening that establishes a setting fully, in a single sustained sweep, can ground everything that follows it. The reader learns the world before they learn the story, and every later scene feels like it’s happening somewhere real. Richard Quine lets the camera take its time, moving through the lobby and past the staff as if it lives there. A slow, confident opening tells the reader the writer knows exactly where they are, and that confidence quickly becomes trust in everything that follows.
Hailey’s Novel
Arthur Hailey’s 1965 novel is the source, and I’ve read that book about ten times. Hailey was a master of the big, researched, multi-story bestseller, the kind that takes you inside an industry, the hotel business here, the airline business in Airport and banking in The Moneychangers, and weaves half a dozen lives through it.
Hotel diverges from the novel a great deal. It keeps the hotel, the owner, the takeover battle, the jewel thief and the hit-and-run, and it changes or drops a lot of the rest. Knowing the book so well, I kept looking for scenes that aren’t there, the subplots and small moments I remembered, and they never came.
That’s the only frustration, and it’s mine more than the film’s. Taken on its own terms, the adaptation works. The film is lean where the book is sprawling, and it keeps the spirit of Hailey’s world: the sense of a vast, complicated institution with hundreds of people keeping it running while the guests upstairs get on with their lives.
For Writers
What it keeps is the novel’s core, the hotel, the takeover and the key subplots, and it drops much of the rest. It’s a lean adaptation of a sprawling book.
Adapting a long novel means deciding what the story is really about and cutting everything that doesn’t serve it. Readers who know the original will miss things, and that’s the price of a story that works in its new form.
The test is whether the adaptation keeps the spirit of the original even when it changes the details. Hotel does: the world of the St. Gregory, and the fight to save it, survives intact, even when the scenes you remember don’t.
Rod Taylor
Rod Taylor is excellent as McDermott. He’s a big, easy, likeable leading man, and he plays the manager as a professional who’s good at his job and cares about the people in the building, from the owner to the kitchen staff. He’s authoritative without being pompous, and he makes you believe he could keep the whole place running.
Taylor was at his peak in the sixties, after The Time Machine and The Birds, and Hotel fits him like a tailored suit. He’s the calm center of a busy film, and his decency gives the story its moral anchor. When he has to make hard choices, about the owner, the buyer and the guests with something to hide, you trust him to make the right ones.
Keycase
The film’s most entertaining character is Keycase Milne, a professional hotel thief played by Karl Malden. Keycase collects room keys, dropped, forgotten or pickpocketed, and uses them to slip into guests’ rooms and steal their jewelry and cash. Malden plays him as a cheerful, cunning craftsman who takes real pride in his work.
His scenes are a lot of fun, a little crime caper running through the middle of the drama, and Malden gives him a sly charm that makes you half hope he gets away with it. Malden is the reason I’d happily sit through the slower stretches again. I found myself grinning every time he got his hands on another key, and I was rooting for him more than a decent hotel guest should.
For Writers
Keycase Milne is a thief the audience half wants to see succeed. His craft and pride make him charming even as he robs the guests blind.
A likeable rogue can bring energy and humor to a serious story. Readers love watching someone who’s very good at what they do, even when what they do is wrong, and competence is its own kind of charm. Give your rogue a craft, a set of personal rules and real pride in the work. The more specific, detailed and skilled their method, the more the reader enjoys watching them, and the more tense it becomes when things finally start to go wrong for them.
The Duke and the Duchess
The darkest thread involves the Duke and Duchess of Lanbourne, played by Michael Rennie and Merle Oberon, an aristocratic couple staying in the hotel’s best suite. They’re hiding a terrible secret: the Duke’s car was involved in a hit-and-run that killed a child, and they’re desperate to cover it up.
The Duchess, cold and calculating, schemes to keep her husband out of trouble, and the storyline gives the film a real moral weight. It shows that behind the elegant doors of a grand hotel, guests bring their worst selves as well as their best. Oberon is chillingly composed, and Rennie gives the Duke a haunted, weak quality that makes the situation feel desperate.
Oberon’s scenes gave me a chill. I think the hit-and-run thread is the best idea in the film, because it cuts against all that gloss, and I’d have gladly traded ten minutes of the McDermott romance for more of her.
Trent and O’Keefe
The central business story, the fight over the hotel’s future, is surprisingly gripping. Melvyn Douglas plays Warren Trent with pride, charm and stubbornness, an old man who built something beautiful and can’t bear to see it turned into a soulless chain hotel. Kevin McCarthy plays O’Keefe as a slick, efficient businessman who sees the St. Gregory purely as a property.
Like Hailey, the film takes Trent’s side, and the film becomes an elegy for a certain kind of old-fashioned, personal hospitality that corporations were swallowing. That theme has only become more relevant since 1967, and it gives the film an unexpected melancholy under its glossy surface. Melvyn Douglas breaks my heart a little as Trent. I’m entirely on his side against O’Keefe, and I like that the film lets the old man be proud and stubborn and still right.
Catherine Spaak plays Jeanne, O’Keefe’s glamorous companion, who becomes involved with McDermott, and Richard Conte turns up as a house detective. The cast is packed with familiar faces, and nobody wastes their time on screen.
Sixties Gloss
Hotel looks wonderful. It’s a Warner Bros. production with big, lavish sets, rich color photography and costumes that capture late-sixties luxury exactly: sharp suits, gowns, jewels and cocktails in the lounge. The hotel itself feels real, full of corridors, service stairs, kitchens and back offices as well as its grand public rooms.
It also belongs to a particular genre, the multi-story drama set in one big institution, which Hailey helped popularize and which led, a few years later, to Airport and the disaster films of the seventies. Hotel is gentler than those films, and more interested in its characters than in spectacle.
New Orleans
Hailey set the novel in New Orleans, and the film keeps the city. That gives it a warmth and a slight air of decadence. The St. Gregory feels like a Southern grande dame, gracious, a little tired and proud of her history, and the city outside, with its jazz, its old money and its humidity, suits the story of a place clinging to the past.
The setting also sharpens the takeover battle. O’Keefe’s chain is a new, placeless kind of hotel that could be anywhere, and the St. Gregory could only be where it is.
The Building as a Character
The star of the film is the hotel itself. The camera keeps returning to its lobby, its switchboard, its kitchens, its corridors and its service lifts, and by the end, you feel you could find your way around it. The building shapes every storyline: who has keys, who sees whom, who can slip in and out unnoticed.
That’s Hailey’s great gift, carried over to the screen. It’s why the film holds together despite juggling so many stories.
Quibbles
Some of the subplots feel rushed, especially for anybody who knows the book, and the film is a little long. The romance between McDermott and Jeanne is thin. A few moments of melodrama are pure sixties studio convention. None of that stopped me enjoying it. Hotel is a confident, entertaining, beautifully made film that has aged far better than most of the big studio pictures of its era.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Hotel weaves several stories through one building over one week, letting the hotel itself become the main character. The guests come and go, and the institution holds them all together.
A single, richly realized setting can unify many separate stories, giving each its own drama while the place provides continuity and meaning. If your story has several threads, find the place or institution that connects them, and let the setting become a character in its own right.
Checking In at the St. Gregory
Hotel is an 8.5 because I loved nearly every minute of it and couldn’t switch off the part of me that knows the book too well. Rod Taylor at his best, Karl Malden’s cheerful jewel thief, Oberon’s cold hit-and-run scheming, Melvyn Douglas fighting for his hotel and that sweeping opening shot all justify the high mark. The thin romance and the missing chunks of Hailey keep it out of the nines, and it’s still a treat.
