Hotel Imperial (1939)

No Quote for this film.

Three actresses were cast as Anna. The first, Marlene Dietrich, was constantly at loggerheads with then-director Henry Hathaway - he wanted to deglamorize her. After some rewriting by 'Grover Jones', she finally quit, and production was frozen. Margaret Sullavan was then brought in as Anna and shooting resumed, but while clowning around with Ray Milland on the set between takes (she was squirting him with a concealed water pistol), she fell and fractured her arm. She refused to do the rest of the film in a sling as the studio heads demanded, and also quit. At this point Dietrich offered to come back, but Paramount refused and instead brought in Italian sex symbol Isa Miranda. However, Miranda knew no English and had to have all her dialogue supplied phonetically.
Actor Ray Milland was seriously injured while making this film. Playing a cavalry officer, Milland was leading a "charge" through a village. As they rounded a corner he saw that someone had left a camera on a tripod in the middle of the street. There was no time to try to pull around it or stop his horse, so Milland, an experienced horseman, tried to get the horse to jump over it. The horse cleared the camera, but the straps that held the saddle onto the horse snapped. Milland was thrown from the saddle, bounced off the wall of a building and landed in a pile of debris and broken masonry. He was unconscious for almost 24 hours and was hospitalized for two weeks.
One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.
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