Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-presented by the Chicago Film Society

The height of Hollywood's polyglot cosmopolitanism from Paramount, the most continental of studios, HOTEL IMPERIAL was based on a 1917 play from Hungarian writer Lajos Biro, directed by Swedish pioneer Mauritz Stiller, produced by German UFA exile Erich Pommer, and built around the peculiar glow of Polish star Pola Negri. The titular hotel stands as a bygone luxury in war-torn Galicia, with the Russian army advancing on Austro-Hungarian forces. An escaped Hussar (James Hall) finds refuge in the HOTEL IMPERIAL and poses as the establishment's butler with the help of housekeeper Anna (Negri), who must fend off the amorous advances of a Russian general (George Siegmann) and keep her eyes on an infamous spy (Michael Vavitch). Stiller's only extant American feature, HOTEL IMPERIAL is a rare glimpse of a cinema too fragile to last.

Print courtesy of the Library of Congress