Hotel (1967)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) As someone who read almost all of Arthur Hailey’s novels as a teenager, I knew what I was getting into in approaching Hotel: A sprawling, ensemble-cast look at a particular environment, with a narrative built of subplots exploring that environment. Some call it didactic fiction — I just liked the stuff. Now, novels like Hailey’s can’t very well be replicated in film: viewers won’t stand for it in the same way that readers do, and there’s only so many subplots you can fit in a two-hour film (as opposed to, say, a miniseries). So, it’s not a surprise if Hotel-the-film is a markedly simpler thing than Hotel-the-novel, nor if the depths of the docufiction aren’t as satisfying. Accordingly, I got far more fun out of the film’s first half than the second, as the job of the hotel manager protagonist is demonstrated, as the subplots are set in motion, as the film takes some time (even fleetingly) to explore its setting. There’s a beautiful one-shot, for instance, coming out of an elevator into the hotel lobby, tracking the protagonist as he takes care of business, then goes back into the elevator. After that, well, the subplots take over and don’t necessarily converge toward a happy ending, and the hotel itself is not allowed to remain the central character like it did in the book. Still, I liked the final result quite a bit — Rod Taylor brings his square-jawed charm to the role of the hotel manager, Catherine Spaak plays a great femme fatale in very 1960s style, the incredible racism of the hotel owner is a reminder of how far we’ve come in fifty years, the production design is impressive and Richard Quine’s direction has its moments. There probably wasn’t room to fit anything more in the film short of turning it into a TV show (which is still not a bad idea, hint). Fleetingly, Hotel did take me back to earlier days reading through Hailey’s brick-sized novels, and that’s also a plus.