The Great Junction Hotel

The newly married couple check into the Great Junction Hotel for what should be a quiet wedding night, only to find the place is threadbare and oddly lively. A sleepy house detective keeps watch more to pass the time than out of real concern, and the hotel’s eccentric staff add confusion rather than help. When the bride disappears from her room, the groom becomes the obvious suspect, while the police on the case prove more bumbling than helpful. The short plays out as a series of misunderstandings and sight gags, with suspicion shifting around the hotel as the night stretches on and explanations remain just out of reach.

Released in 1931, The Great Junction Hotel was directed by William Beaudine and made as a short, Masquers' Club spoof. The cast includes Edward Everett Horton, Patsy Ruth Miller, Harry Gribbon, Richard Carle and Frank McHugh, and it was intended for theatrical short-subject programs.

As a brief 1931 comedy short, there are no reliable box office records and it wasn't treated like a major feature. It circulated as part of short-reel lineups, so any commercial impact was modest and tied to the fortunes of the theaters that booked it rather than national grosses.

The film trades on broad farce, mistaken identity and the incompetence of authority figures, staples of early sound comedies. Horton’s measured, nervous persona contrasts with the hotel’s chaotic staff, and the script relies on quick set pieces and comic timing more than character development. Modern viewers may appreciate it as an example of how early talkies handled bedroom-hotel comedy and visual jokes.

As an artifact of early 1930s studio shorts, it reflects the era’s taste for brief, gag-driven entertainment and the Masquers' Club sensibility. Horton's performance hints at the comic character work he would carry through his career, and the movie preserves the kind of hotel-bound farce that informed later screwball and situational comedies.