"Dinner at Eight" - Movie Review

A 1933 screen version of a 1932 play of the same name, which might as well have been set on a stage for all the set changes we had. About a bunch of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other - I can't claim they're all nasty, as a couple of them do good things. But this is the exception, not the rule.

Millicent Jordan (Burke) is terribly excited to have invited Lord and Lady Fencliffe to dinner, as her husband's shipping business struggles. Their daughter is having an affair they don't know about with an aging and alcoholic actor, and the other invitees include a former movie star the husband had a crush on 30 years prior, a very crass possible business partner and his equally crass wife, and the philandering local doctor and his wife.

Wikipedia's absolute first statement about the movie was "Pre-Code," and in hindsight that's blatantly obvious: the drunken, thrice-married, not-yet-divorced 47 year old actor carrying on with a 20 year old girl PLUS a married doctor having multiple affairs his wife knows about ... dead give-away, if only I'd been thinking. As interesting as that is, the characters are unappealing and the acting is too uneven to raise this to any significant level of interest.