Week-End at the Waldorf

Week-End at the Waldorf (1945)

It's always exciting and Romantic!

Anything can happen during a weekend at New York's Waldorf-Astoria: a glamorous movie star meets a world-weary war correspondent and mistakes him for a jewel thief; a soldier learns that without an operation he'll die and so looks for one last romance with a beautiful but ambitious stenographer; a cub reporter tries to get the goods on a shady man's dealing with a foreign potentate.

Date of release
1945-10-04
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (15)
Runtime
2h 10m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director
Robert Z. Leonard

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Grand Hotel and Grand Hotel

Week-End at the Waldorf is a 1945 American comedy drama film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, and Van Johnson. The film follows the misadventures of several guests and employees of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, including a Hollywood actress (Rogers), a stenographer (Turner), an Air Force captain (Johnson) and a war correspondent (Pidgeon). Its screenplay is based on Vicki Baum's novel Grand Hotel and Baum's subsequent stage adaptation of her novel; both of which also served as the source material for the 1932 film Grand Hotel.

Production

Waldorf-Astoria management wanted the film shot in color in order to show the hotel at its best advantage, a demand that almost led Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) executives to switch the locale to San Francisco and change the title to Palace in the Sky.

Lana Turner's casting was announced in July 1944.

The production budget for Week-End at the Waldorf was $2,561,000. Mrs. Lucius Boomer, wife of the president of the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, served as a technical advisor on the film, as did Ted Saucier, who handled public relations for the property.

Writer Richard Alleman, in his book New York: The Movie Lover's Guide: The Ultimate Insider Tour of Movie New York (2013), praised the film's art design as a "triumph," writing that it is "practically impossible to tell which scenes have been shot by the second-unit crew on location and which were done at the MGM studios."

The film pays homage to its source by including a scene in which Chip Collyer recreates a scene from the 1930 play based on the Vicki Baum novel, and Irene Malvern identifies it as an excerpt from Grand Hotel.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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