"Nazis never change."

HOTEL BERLIN hits kind of different when you realize this film was released while WWII was still happening. Vicki Baum, who left Germany for America in the 1930s, followed up the massive success of Grand Hotel, set during WWI, with an even more timely "hotel novel," released in 1943 and adapted by Warners in early 1945.

The opening credits, printed in a book bearing Baum's name, announce this as serious literary adaptation. What follows is a morally murky portrait of Germans in the final days of the Reich—resistance fighters, opportunists, true believers, and those just trying to survive. For the first 15 minutes, you genuinely can't tell who you are supposed to root for.

Peter Lorre chews delicious scenery as a scientist grappling with science's complicity in genocide, while Andrea King's Lisa embodies the desperate amorality of survival—promising herself to anyone who might get her out, playing resistance fighter when convenient, but ultimately loyal only to herself.

But it's Faye Emerson's Tillie (the hotel hostess) who provides the film's emotional core. Her air raid shelter breakdown—as she screams at a smarmy Alan Hale about his journey from petty local bully to petty local Nazi bully—and her climactic confession to the resistance—revealing how she became an informant after the Nazis reportedly killed her Jewish lover—are devastating. The parallel between her genuine shame and Lisa's calculated performance shows Baum's understanding of how fascism corrupts both willing and unwilling participants.

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