Erich von Stroheim’s Spectacular Art Is Back

As Steuben, Stroheim assumed a military bearing and status that he’d never approached in his actual Army days. The performance style that he thereby invented set the mold for most of his future roles; it was a defining trait of his films, and it embodied the convergence of artifice and realism that defines the art of movies. Stroheim’s formality, rigidity, punctiliousness, and unctuousness would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the power that those traits symbolize—the alluring power of the sword-wielding, fiercely disciplined officer and the imperial power represented by the Army in which he serves. Stroheim’s turn as a dangerous seducer sexualizes this power—blending unrestrained desire with a sadistic pleasure in cruelty—as if providing, in his person, a moral X-ray of the imperial milieu that he had escaped.

Stroheim pushed his actors to the limit, doing countless takes, regardless of time and footage, until he achieved the desired effect. He also incurred expenses by changing the script in the course of the shoot and insisting on elaborate sets, rendering old Europe with a profusion of details that convey both a quasi-documentary authenticity and the psychological undertones of that milieu’s dark attraction. The resulting budget was much higher than Laemmle had planned, but there was no lasting discord, because “Blind Husbands” became a commercial and critical success. Stroheim was instantly hailed as an important new director, and Laemmle immediately hired him again. First, Stroheim wrote and directed (but did not act in) “The Devil’s Pass Key” (1920), a now lost film about an American playwright in Paris whose wife is targeted by blackmailers. Then, in 1922, came “Foolish Wives” a kind of a follow-up to his début, which turned out to be both an artistic landmark and a harbinger of production troubles to come.

The story of “Foolish Wives” hit riskily close to home, with a premise based on the sort of imposture that was part of Stroheim’s own self-presentation. He plays the so-called Count Sergius Karamzin, one of a trio of Russians who pose as aristocrats in Monte Carlo, seeking rich people to fleece. (Sergius, in addition, seeks women to seduce—or sexually assault.) Having picked a capital of luxury as his setting, Stroheim proceeded lavishly, expanding his fanaticism for detail, his cast of characters and extras, his vision of villainy, and, of course, his budget. “Foolish Wives” is colossal in its scope, with giant sets that included haughty villas, a vast casino, a majestic hotel, and a counterfeiter’s mucky neighborhood. Stroheim also insisted on an apparently unprecedented degree of physical realism, demanding, for his Café de Paris set, twelve-foot-high glass windows and a thirty-six-foot dome. Laemmle, footing the bill for these sumptuous methods, saw an opportunity to position Universal as a spare-no-expense enterprise, with a billboard in Times Square keeping boastful track of the ever-mounting budget.

Still, Stroheim’s spending was out of control—literally so, insofar as attempting to rein him in seemed to provoke new extravagances. When ordered to cut a location, he shot there nonetheless and charged the hotel bills to Universal. The studio’s newly hired production manager, Irving Thalberg, who was only twenty-one years old at the time, threatened to fire Stroheim as director—and Stroheim, in turn, threatened to quit as the star. Exasperated, Thalberg dispatched a team to reclaim the studio’s cameras and thus end the shoot. Stroheim had again generated vast amounts of footage; his first cut ran more than six hours and he proposed splitting it into two movies. Instead, Thalberg took over the editing, and Universal released “Foolish Wives” at a running time of not much more than two hours—and then, while it was in release, kept cutting it. (The exact durations of silent films were uncertain, owing to varying projection speeds.)

Even in Thalberg’s truncation, the movie is a masterwork, its overwhelming profusion of detail matched by the angular tension of Stroheim’s images. It depicts the seething furies of Old World traditions by means of a coruscating modernism. Its graphic clarity teems with ornament and glitter, visual intoxications that signal delusions and snares. The lustrous surfaces hide moral horrors, silence emotional terrors, and block out the filth beyond their boundaries. Stroheim is, above all, an olfactory director; his characters match lusts with scents—blossoms, garments, hay—and, long before Smell-O-Vision and Odorama, he made movies that stink. His characters obsessively perfume themselves, and his décor is filled with flowers that the characters use to distract themselves from the ambient odors of life, human or animal. In “Foolish Wives,” the ultimate stink is provided by a death scene involving a “burial” in a sewer.