“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8
They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von Bickel, von Eberhard, von Steuben, von Hohenegg, von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburg, von Furst, von Traunsee, von Rauffenstein, von Harden, von Maylerling, von Stroheim. The many roles, the many selves — none the actual. Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim, who served with the 4th Dragoons, the 14th Huzaars, the 3rd Regular Uhlans; who rode gallantly against Bosnia-Herzegovina during the annexation; who left that place with 16 inches of lead in his body, and a Franz Josef Cross. He, of gilded descent, lost of his fortune but not of his blood. The finest in a lifetime of performances, the longest held, the most esteemed, most convincing. But, as the others, a costume of dreams. If we are to pull back the curtain — if we are to deal in truth — another shape emerges. Erich Oswald Stroheim, of no great and noble house, the son of Jewish milliners in the 7th District of Vienna. For all his pomp and deceit, he spoke German with the voice of a Viennese cabdriver. This was noted by Josef von Sternberg, née Jonas Sternberg, another of Vienna’s emigrant Jews: a faux-aristocracy of faux-Teutons was fast growing up in the Hollywood hills. But if Hollywood’s numerous Germans were suspicious of von Stroheim’s origins — Billy Wilder also noted the accent — they staged no unmasking. In 1930 such a thing was attempted in Austria, by one Siegfried Weyer of the right-wing journal Der Kuckkuck. The account was admonished as fascist claptrap by those elsewhere on the political spectrum. Truth, spoken falsely, thus discarded. Some months after the article’s publication, von Stroheim visited Vienna for the first time since he’d left it in 1909. He wore a false beard. Another role, another evasion, another defense of the outlandish myth upon which the whole of his life was founded. Could it be that Stroheim had inverted this very formula? A lie, spoken truly, thus accepted.
Perhaps those in Hollywood, within the imaginarium, had no interest in the truth of Von. There he is remembered as an actor, a director, and a proverb. A reminder that if one contests the Hollywood system — and if one does not restrict himself in his ambition, in the height of his expression, and in his apparent felicity in spending other peoples’ money — then he will be brought to heel. Crushed, both practically and metaphorically. His remembrance in film history, based on the axiom that his resistance to the Hollywood machine represents a symbol of martyrdom, is then something chimerical. Of the nine films he directed (one of which split and released in halves), only two were completed as von Stroheim intended; and of these two, one is lost, while the other is preserved in truncated form. Of the rest, all manner of decrepitude prevails: some were shredded in studio-mandated edits; some were halted midway through production; on one von Stroheim was replaced as director; on another the majority of the film was reshot. Von Stroheim courted destruction: he would attempt films of unthinkable length within the Hollywood circuit — a nine-hour cut of Greed, or an eleven-hour cut of The Wedding March (of which one-third hadn’t even been shot). He would disregard any concept of economy — Foolish Wives ballooned an original budget of $250,000 into over $1,100,000, then the most expensive film ever made. The number would have grown larger had the young Irving Thalberg not shut down production. The remnants of these broken pictures are phantom-films. And so the director becomes not the Erich von Stroheim of the films as they survive, in their torn and bandaged report, but of the films as they might have been. Von Stroheim: the mad genius of the silent era, of limitless expanse, upon whom we may project all kinds of fancy. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, as Keats has it. Many who extol McTeague, the film we never got, do not necessarily like Greed, the film we did; they instead find it some lachrymose deposit, the grave of the unknown movie, to be wept for, to be remembered for what it is not. Should the nine-hour Greed eventually emerge from the ether, it might well be the worst possible scenario for its enduring reputation. It is only in not being seen that the film can maintain its invisible perfection. It is tantalizing in its evisceration, and one receives with von Stroheim a cinema eviscerated. But if his abidance is chimerical — and, in large portion, imagined — this should not mean his cinema is merely incidental, a frame within which any narrative, or idea, can be supplied. What remnants there are resound with a special quality. And the substance of imagination that links them together, an imagination that distends from von Stroheim’s own life-as-performance, must then be taken as a texture of the thing. He is an artist who made life his art, and spun this life into cinema, in those films he directed and those films he acted in: it is not Erich Oswald Stroheim, the man behind the man, but Erich von Stroheim. An invention so vivid, so absolute, that it becomes apparent that it is not merely acted, in the cynical or abusive sense — acted in the way Karamzin acts as a fraudulent Count in Foolish Wives — but sorely believed. The illusion becomes delusion: Erich von Stroheim is a middle-class Jew weeping for the Hapsburgs, among whose number he counts himself an erstwhile member.
In the late November of 1909 von Stroheim arrived in New York, having left Bremen a different man. We could conceive of it a dusky, dim-lit day; the Hollywood fog machines pumping out a delicate mist from which our man might emerge. A handsome, ginger type, with a slick of dark hair split midwise. Whether he is monocled will be left to the reader’s discretion, but that this is a man who could pull off a monocle is beyond dispute. His success in this new country was neither immediate nor guaranteed. On both coasts did he eke out some part of a living, embroiled in all kinds of romantic dismay, and followed by poverty. His entry into motion pictures was as a bit-actor of background roles; he was possibly in Griffith’s monumental The Birth of a Nation, and he was definitely in Griffith’s monumental Intolerance. What should be remembered, in this the early morning of von Stroheim’s existence, is the proximity of his lie. The stuff of Austrian aristocrats strutting the world was not some archaism or abstract memory, but a very real expression of a Viennese nobility still extant and still strutting. Alt-Wien, as they called it, lived and breathed; the Hapsburgs presided; and a vast peerage lay sunning in their glow. Stroheim’s appeal to this high stratum of society was one of credible envy: these people were not unthinkably distant, but visible in the everyday of Viennese existence. By leaving Vienna behind him, Stroheim could at once make himself much closer to the Vienna he preferred; a Vienna that still, in his absence, danced and sorrowed to the strains of Strauss and Lehár. If he is, by matter of birth, exempt from such pleasures, he will find them by some other road.
Therefore enters the great irony of the von Stroheim complex: the very event that would provide him his fame — and the opportunity to rebuild the Vienna of faraway — would be the same one to destroy the city he so dearly valued, and render this opportunity a lifelong obsession. 1914 — Sarajevo — wrong turn — Ferdinand — Serbia — Russia — Germany — Entente — 1918. Austria-Hungary was no more. In the midst of this destruction, the United States found itself embroiled; the Germans — the Hun — were to become the subject of relentless propaganda, much of it developed by the incipient powers of Hollywood. Stroheim, with his pseudo-particle and devious charisma, found himself in sudden demand. He took on this new alter-ego, that of the Horrible Hun, with some measure of glee: in 1918 he featured in three films that would determine his reputation and public image for years to come. The first: The Unbeliever. Proselytizing hogwash in which von Stroheim, as von Schnieditz, would order the summary killing of an old woman and child by firing squad. The second: The Hearts of the World. A Griffith epic — and not all that bad — in which Stroheim plays a bit-part bad-guy (“A Hun”); the opportunity to work with Griffith was, to von Stroheim’s mind, the greatest of privileges. The third: The Heart of Humanity. Shameless plagiarism of the Griffith picture, which replaces emotional catharsis with hysteria. Von Stroheim takes the lead antagonist — von Eberhard — and achieves lasting infamy. The film’s most memorable scene features von Stroheim attempting the rape of a red cross nurse. A babbling baby is distracting him from sexual assault. As such, he takes up the baby, and tosses it out of a second-story window. Even in the overexposure of the 21st century, such flippant barbarity is shocking. Von Stroheim’s identity therefore took on a new aspect: that of the lascivious, violent Hun. The Man You Love To Hate, as the marketeers had it. He was recognized in the street and heckled; he enjoyed such heckling. His presence seemed to have extended beyond that of “actor,” with something of an inherent assumption that his existence on the screen and his existence in reality were consubstantial, built from the same stuff. This connexion would follow his career. But more than follow, one might say define — this new facet of the Erich von Stroheim mythos had already been integrated into his personality. He did not simply wear a mask, but meld it with his flesh.
But then the rub. The Great War, in which he had found notoriety, and opportunity, made ruin of his beloved Wien. The Hapsburgs were exiled; the aristocracy diminished; the empire fractured across its many ethnic lines. In later years, he would reminisce “the military sound of the feet of officers’ horses on cobblestones,” and the “soldiers strutting and pulling their moustaches for the admiration of red-cheeked nursemaids.” In this moment, his alter-ego became an anachronism, a ruin. Erich von Stroheim was not merely an Austro-Hungarian gentleman, met with hard times on the American coastline, but a rubble of lost time. Some fragment of a fallen empire, with no Alt Wien remaining, only the new Rote Wien, peopled by socialists and democrats that he despised. In some sense, Erich Oswald Stroheim had prevailed on the continent: a republic stands where was once an empire, and where opportunity had once been limited, it now flowed widely to the peoples of the city. But Erich von Stroheim was a romantic. With no Vienna to return to, even in some flight of fancy, an imaginary city grew up in an imaginary man. The Hapsburgian Vienna was laid to rest, but not the Vienna of von Stroheim. In any case, the first films he directed did not occupy themselves with that changed city. Blind Husbands, one of the most remarkable directional debuts of the silent period (that von Stroheim also wrote and edited), is instead nonspecific in its detail. It is set in the Austrian Alps, but exactly when is obscure: a dream-time, perhaps, as so much of that film resembles a kind of dream. The characters less people than symbols; a morality play injected with some libidinous impulse that seems, in the midst, to contradict its conservative ending. It depicts a love triangle in which the sanctity of marriage prevails, but it is in that failed seduction that all the intrigue lies. Von Stroheim, who plays the antagonist von Steuben, is perhaps leaning a little on his Horrible Hun presence. He grins malevolently, and in his short, limber stature exudes a cunning, building this cunning into sinister poise. But this is not the same Hun he played previously. It is instead, however caricatured, some degree closer to a confessional; an exploded version of von Stroheim’s own persona, which finds catharsis in death, von Steuben thrown from a mountaintop for his sins. (It is a notable addendum that in his attempted remake of the film, in 1930, von Stroheim’s significant change is to spare the von Steuben character’s life; perhaps in the intervening decade, Stroheim decided he was redeemable.) Von Stroheim was, in 1919, between marriages. His first wife had divorced him for extreme cruelty. He had left the second, and his baby son, for the third. He was a man in need of atonement.
In 1920 von Stroheim would direct his next film, The Devil’s Passkey. An equal to Blind Husbands in its acclaim and commerce, though less in its longevity. The film is utterly lost, no trace of it having survived the century since its making. And with it, the paragraph that might have been. Let this fragment suffice.
His third feature, and his first great film, would be Foolish Wives, released in 1922, whose making proved such a fiasco as to haunt von Stroheim’s career for so long as he had one. But forgoing its multitude of production ails, the thing itself is fascinating for its concept. A Russian émigré Count, Karamzin (acted by von Stroheim), and his two cousins are established in Monte Carlo. But the Count is not a count; and his cousins are not his cousins. Karamzin is rather a fraud, using the image of nobility to spur his own advancement; he cozies up to the American ambassador’s wife to deflect any suspicion of his station. Did von Stroheim feel any nervous excitement in so blatantly pouring out his secret upon the screen, in the most expensive film ever made? The false Count played by the false von. But this dualism of character becomes the dualism of his cinema. Of the image set against the substance; that the seductive exterior and the lurid interior are not incompatible, but rather indivisible. The idea of the nobility is in some degree exposed: it is all etiquette, dress, and propriety, each of which perfectly fakable by a committed outsider. It is only by the incredible efforts of a spurned serving girl — a member of the underclass — that Karamzin’s cowardice is exposed, and his doom assured; had he remained only among the many-barreled scions of Monte Carlo his ruse would have gone on unseen, and undetected.
Several other ideas also emerge in Foolish Wives, one of which being the ambient incursion of warfare: the Great War. Many of the crowd-scenes in the film are mottled with broken veterans, who limp and straggle through the resplendence surrounding. They are the engine on which this extravagance relies (if one is to take the generalized view that sacrifice in war defends cities from destruction), and yet they are shirked by its purveyors. A recurring “gag,” so it seems, is of a ghostly American soldier who seems constantly boorish with regard to the ambassador’s wife (where Karamzin is so mannerly). She drops a book, and he fails to pick it up for her. It is only later in the film that we realize he has lost his arms in battle — that the image of discourtesy is an illusion, much in the way that Karamzin’s urbane deportment is similarly illusive. This is the juxtaposition of the film (expressed as a difference between European delicacy and American churl), and at once a recapitulation of von Stroheim’s oldest trick, reflecting his essential personality: the division of image and self, which applies not merely to those in high places, but to all people. Here the man becomes his cinema.
Foolish Wives suffers somewhat in its degradation — its original length of 384 minutes (not counting the material unshot) was slashed down to 117, and has since only been restored to 142; we can judge only a fragment of the thing. But what survives even in this fragment is the other consistency in von Stroheim’s cinema: that of enormous, outrageous scale, matched by enormous, outrageous detail. Remembering the film’s original budget of $250,000 is useful when reading the following sentence. $400,000 was spent solely on constructing the sets for the film. The Monte Carlo set (which measured 120 meters long and 90 meters wide) was so convincing that, on first watching the film, it’s easy for one to assume it was shot on location, despite knowing that a Hollywood production in Monaco, in 1920, on location, is totally unheard of. It’s simply the explanation that makes best sense in the moment. Most extravagant of von Stroheim’s increasingly extravagant requirements was the insistence on 48 plate-glass windows, installed into the façade of his Café de Paris, emplaced only for the reflection they provided of the Hotel de Paris and the Casino, both sets constructed nearby. This whim cost $12,000 dollars, which means nearly five percent of his original budget was spent on reflections upon glass: there, in that insistence on bridging from the unreal into the real by sheer aesthetic presence, is the cinema of von Stroheim. And also the seed for his next folly, in which he would resurrect a city closer to his soul.
Vienna — old — gray — historical — The town of joy — of gladness — and of mirth — of sordid sorrow — and of grief — The town of Dukes — of Princes — and of Counts. So read the title cards that introduce Merry-Go-Round, in the version that exists. A vague riff on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s Old Heidelberg, this is a film that can only be partially attributed to von Stroheim. He wrote the script, planned the production, and directed it — or, only a part of it. Foolish Wives was a disaster in more than just its making. The film was slated by the press, and even if it sold a bounty of tickets, it couldn’t hope to cover the mass of its expense. Von Stroheim had, quite willfully, painted himself the raging, maniacal director, whose spending was implacable and whose films were perverted. (This was, of course, true.) Owing to these difficulties, various stipulations had been made for the production of his next picture. For instance, he was forbidden to act in it. His starring in Foolish Wives had put the suits at Universal in a bind — one cannot fire a director who is also the star. Von Stroheim nonetheless considered himself untouchable.
He began production much in the way he intended to continue it, bowing to no producer. In six weeks he was removed from the film, and was replaced by Rupert Julian, a director of pliable character, who would finish the film by 1923. But if only a little of this film was directed by von Stroheim, Julian can be commended in his sticking closely to the script as written (even if he did, less nobly, claim the whole of it as his own). Much of von Stroheim’s intention is carried out by different hands. Here, abetted by the master set designer Richard Day (who had worked on all of Stroheim’s films previous), the ambition is made flesh. Vienna, reborn, remade. Von Stroheim’s script is again one of juxtaposed elements, a division between Prince von Hohenegg (the nominal von Stroheim character) and the many working classes in Prater, Vienna’s famous amusement park. Here, more than in any previous film, are von Stroheim’s two selves most pronounced. The haughty and the humble, a collision of his own alter-egos, in the fray of a dreamt-of Vienna. Erich von Stroheim meets Erich Oswald Stroheim. As ever, it is a collision of the beautiful and the grotesque: these noble people doing ignoble things, fragments of beauty caught in the unbearable muck. Though the film’s most remarkable incursion is that hinted at in Foolish Wives, and years earlier, in Griffith’s Hearts of the World. The film reaches its climactic moment — the prince, who had been pretending himself a civilian, has been exposed by his lower-class lover after she spots his picture in a newspaper marriage announcement. He is to be wedded to Countess Gisella von Steinbruck, a marriage of political, not romantic, inspiration. Here one might expect contrition, or some act of desperation, or even the tragic thrumming of lasting misery. But instead, it is a non-sequitur: War in Europe!
Griffith’s Hearts of the World is arranged differently — situating the war toward the beginning of the film, rather than toward the end, but his effect is similar: to disrupt the world as we know it, to throw up “the old ways” in sudden, abstract conflagration. Merry-Go-Round even features a mournful Franz Josef signing the declaration of war — “Horrible, horrible — no sorrow is spared to me!” Not, it might be supposed, the mood expressed by the Austro-Hungarian brass, but very much the echo of a mournful Stroheim. (In an unproduced screenplay written in the late ’30s — whose production was, with some irony, prevented by new warfare — this scenario is repeated, with Emperor Josef haunted by “The White Dame” (the film itself: La Dame Blanche) at each stage of Austria’s peril, including Sarajevo. This idea of fatalistic doom will thread through all of von Stroheim’s cinema.) The Prince is thereby sent off to war, and all that might have been is to be no more. The film’s ending, as it exists, departs from von Stroheim’s initial conception. He had imagined the Prince and his once-prissy bride limping through a ruined post-war Vienna, passing by Mitzi, his former-lover. They do not see each other. Here it is the walking by, the defeat of romance, that remarks its culmination. The version shot by Julian instead imagines the very convenient death of Countess Gisella, therefore freeing up the Prince for a sudden marriage to Mitzi, who he finds where he left her; Mitzi’s hunchbacked betrothed stands nobly aside so she might have the better man. It is tawdry, insipid stuff, but somehow still a little mournful. Whatever their youthful gaiety, it cannot feel the same, not in the postscript of war, the aristocrat stripped of his title, old Vienna gone for good.
There is premised the tragic nexus of Erich von Stroheim, though at once it is a vision compromised. He will return to it. But the greatest infamy of his career was soon to follow. Enormous tracts have been written on Greed — its construction, its destruction — but here we concern ourselves less with the film than the man, or more specifically the part of the man, who made it. First mooted in 1920 (and surely dreamed of before that), Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 film of McTeague would become his most famous, infamous, expansive, ambitious work. It was enormously costly and a failure of similar proportions: hated near-unanimously in its day, and creating yet another rift between von Stroheim and his financiers, who cut the film to pieces. But time has been kinder to what remains of Greed. In 1962, at perhaps the acme of its reputation, it was voted the fourth best film of all time in the Sight & Sound poll. If this is exaggerated acclaim, it reflects the inescapable truth: even its dilapidated form, Greed has a claim to rough-hewn majesty. But it is, in the split personality of von Stroheim, perhaps better attributed to Erich Oswald than to his semi-noble counterpart. While the film is a close adaptation of Frank Norris’ novel, it also resembles in many respects the life of its director. Not the imagined triumphs outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral, but rather his life in the actual: an impoverished man in San Francisco, au fait with the German immigrant community, ruled by alcohol, rages, and there, always lingering, the want of money.
Greed is Stroheim’s bleakest film, and the cuts demanded by Thalberg made it bleaker. Those limned passages in the film and novel, that provide a relief relative to the central story, that imply romance can prevail, and those details that reveal vile action is often motivated by material concern: these are all removed. What remains is a ceaseless report of human misery, of greed begetting greed, murder begetting murder, all things dying under a Californian sun. The familiar divisions of von Stroheim’s work are here sublimated: what class difference exists between McTeague and his wife is clearly insignificant by the time they meet; and while much is made of delusion, this film is raw in its imagery: it is never beautiful, only grotesque. It is also one of only two von Stroheim films set in America. The other — his last — is Walking Down Broadway, adapted from a play by Dawn Powell. That film — positioned on the opposite coast — is another attributable to Erich Oswald Stroheim, resembling in some way his life in shabby New York, trapped beneath loathsome clouds. Again, it is a film of compounded misery (perhaps more relentless than the original Greed), and again it has little truck with beauty, or sublimity (save one very poignant, if slightly ironic long push-in toward an image of Christ). Instead, there is rape, jealousy, abortion, desolation: here is a universe absent of Von. His subjects are not, in themselves, special. Not in either film. His concern with marriage — as a broken idea used for political, or economical purpose (and thus divorced from romance) — occurs in each of his films, in some guise. Most horrifically in Queen Kelly, in which a reluctant Prince is first forcibly betrothed to a mad virago monarch, later mirrored by Kelly’s own marriage to the utterly repulsive Jan Vryheid. But the American films are drearier, by dint of their visual poverty. It is as though von Stroheim, and in the case of Queen Kelly certainly von, is willing to concede the desperate degradation of mankind, so long as it might coexist with beauty, romance, the magnitude of art. Sapped of these things, one becomes, alas, an American.
The catastrophe that was Greed again put von Stroheim in a precarious position — he had another picture to fulfil in his contract to (what became, midway through Greed’s production) MGM, but was as a defeated general, his crest diminished, his stature crumpled. The Merry Widow, adapting (with an extreme laxity) the operetta by Lehár, was to be his next film, and all evidence suggests he had worked out the preliminary organization of it before Greed was assassinated by businessmen. Which is to say, it was not foisted upon him, though much else would be — its star (the otherwise dangerously incompetent Mae Murrary); its cinematographer; its final cut. He seemed in this instance a director willing to cooperate, but lost of his maddened spark. A Stroheim willing to compromise seems some oxymoronic statement, and the relative weakness of this film perhaps redounds the illogic that forged it. But it is, unlike Greed, a return to the fantasy.
Set in Monteblanco (a very loose veil over Montenegro), the majority of the narrative constitutes a kind of prequel to Lehár’s original, dealing less with the widow herself — who is suddenly enriched at the death of her wealthy husband, and sought for her riches by the principality’s most eligible bachelor — than the detail that this eligible bachelor, one Danilo, had previously been in love with the widow, before her marriage. It is this romance that makes at least two-thirds of von Stroheim’s version. Though it is as much romance as it is anti-, again (again, again) Stroheim mingles with the image of love so much lust, so much violence, that the appellation of “nobility” appears wholly misconstrued; and yet one might think of von Stroheim as a monarchist, as a man who — nonetheless — reminisces this lost time, however vile its protagonists prove themselves. The division in narrative is here made between the protagonist and antagonist — in Lehár’s operetta, there is just one man courting the widow (Sonia in the original, an Irish Sally in the film), whereas Stroheim splits this man in two. There is the Good Prince, Danilo, and the Bad Prince, Mirko. Yet both are sexually aggressive; they reflect not some polar morality, but are two positions on a close spectrum. One sees in them, again, two Stroheims: Mirko is alike to the older model, the Horrible Hun, the von Steuben; whereas Danilo (played with pensive subtlety by John Gilbert) is the prototype for a later, redeemable version of the Stroheim protagonist, in whom lives an evil, but as much some capacity to outgrow those fouler impulses, in the face of love. So much as he is the nostalgic, and the fabulist, von Stroheim is the romantic, and it is that — absent or perverted in Greed — that lifts his otherwise perverse, demented cinema into some space of light.
But perhaps more remarkable is the version of The Merry Widow that was not filmed. Where the ending is patently absurd — the widow, promised to Mirko, is suddenly freed by a surprise assassination and can marry her true love after all — the planned finale returned to Merry-Go-Round, returned to Hearts of the World. It was not to be a random assassination, but one alike to the Sarajevo shooting; and in lieu of waltzing and dueling, the film would instead divert into warfare: it seems von Stroheim cannot envision this old world, rebuilding it as remembered, without also forecasting its doom. Not a doom unearned: the Baron Sadoja, one of von Stroheim’s most horrendous inventions, is the merry widow’s less merry husband, before the matter of his death. He seems a lecherous capitalist, a foot fetishist beset by locomotor ataxia (despite their sometimes sympathetic portrayal in Foolish Wives and Merry-Go-Round, von Stroheim is often derogatory of the physically disabled). The kingdom lies upon his money, the kingdom is dependent on the slathering Baron. His part is cut substantially in the film — too much to make a serious impression — but his essence is that of dissipation, and of a failure both moral and aesthetic. The former is inevitable, the latter unforgivable. Nobility kneels to the vulgar, and the thing goes up in flames. The idea, unfilmed by von Stroheim in Merry-Go-Round, and unfilmed by anyone in The Merry Widow, would stick to Stroheim’s mind. One begins to think there is only one film within Erich von Stroheim, struggling to escape.
Despite its compromise — or indeed, because of it — The Merry Widow would become von Stroheim’s greatest box office success. And by the special alchemy of Hollywood accountancy, he would see none of its profit. Some poetic irony would later strike in his favour: Universal’s 1934 remake barred von Stroheim from involvement, selecting instead the delicate Ernst Lubitsch. The remake bombed, failing to break even. Though in Lubitsch’s film, the better of the two, one is permitted some heightened vision into Lehár’s world: the dancing at Maxim’s, Danilo and Fifi among diamantine stars. It is a contrast that proves how ugly von Stroheim’s vision could be: in his “waltz” scene, Mirko looks at Sally, but she fades from the frame: only her jewels, those other diamantine stars, remain.
Von Stroheim would return from his creative dolor with a greater ambition than ever before. Securing the financial backing from Pat Powers, a successful if uninspired independent film producer, he set upon the culmination of his many half-films. “They say I give them sewers — and dead cats! This time I am giving them beauty. Beauty — and apple blossoms! More than they can stand!” Thus appeared The Wedding March, in which exists Merry-Go-Round, and The Merry Widow, and even among the earliest of von Stroheim’s follies, a play he wrote in 1912 titled In the Morning. There, like in The Wedding March, the protagonist, Nicki, is a broke aristocrat told to marry for money; there, like in The Wedding March, his lover is Mitzzi (Mitzi in the later film), a lower-class artiste. That play was written while the Hapsburgs still reigned; 16 years later, we find the same characters in a different world. But not yet. The film is set in 1914, and dedicated to all the true lovers in the world. Before the action begins, we see “The Iron Man” — a symbol of fate, of evil: he will recur. Nicki, played by von Stroheim, is a ribald aristo who flirts with his servants and makes regular appearance at his father’s orgies. He, and his house (the von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburgs — which translates, for whatever reason, to Wildlover-Roughhousers), are out of cash. His parents — both equally dissolute — suggest he marry for money; he agrees, if they find him a bride. At the Corpus Christi march he spots in the crowd a girl, Mitzi (played with some luminous beauty by Fay Wray), and between them is an invisible skein. But she is courted by Schani (name of the foul merry-go-round owner in the film of that title), a geometrically-coifed bastard with several thousand chips upon his shoulder. She and he are of the lower-class — the Erich Oswald class — and he, especially, resents the aristocracy who appear so uppity and so dissipated. One of the new Viennese, as according to von Stroheim, to whom the city was later bequeathed. During this same ceremony, within St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Nicki’s parents spy out Mr. Schweisser, a blustering capitalist and corn-plaster magnate with an unwed daughter. She is in lame in one leg, and fragile; ZaSu Pitts imbues her with a quiet sadness. They hatch out their own version of Nicki’s future.
Therein is the drama established: two lovers, a rival and an arranged marriage. It is at once essentially simple (Rosenbaum, in his evaluation of von Stroheim, considers it overly so), and yet the most nuanced edition of von Stroheim’s earthly vision. Nicki has much the appearance and tendency of the ancient von Steuben, but is then transfigured by a sudden romance. Nicki will later meet Mitzi at the wine-garden where she and her parents work (abutting the butchery where Schani plies his meats); she plays the harp under a hemisphere of apple blossoms. Together they will approach the Danube-edge, and sit together in Mitzi’s “fairy-carriage,” under the apple trees. Blossom will flutter down in what must be the most romantic of images ever conceived (there beside the radio conversation in A Matter of Life and Death, or any scene in Brief Encounter). The camera dissolves between them, in softest focus, the white of Nicki’s coat — wrapped around Mitzi — glowing with the blossom. When shuffling into the carriage, Nicki sits on a nail: even here, the warrant of fate lingers. The next time we see Nicki is at another of his father’s orgies — it is a jarring image, and one senses as much in von Stroheim’s expression. That night he will meet Mitzi again, and lie to her about where he’d been — not the lie of a cad, not anymore, but of the embarrassed romantic. He has become, in the shade of love, pathetic. Von Steuben no more. The redemption of Danilo in The Merry Widow has been developed: where there the “good” and “evil” of von Stroheim had been abstracted from the other, here the two occupy one body. The self triumphs over the self.
But we must return to Schani, in whom might reside the Erich Oswald of yore, raging against a universe to which he cannot belong. He loses his woman, he loses his stature, but he is shortly vindicated. Nicki’s father and Schweissar agree upon a most munificent arrangement; the parents lean on their son, on his promise; the marriage to Cecelia Schweissar is confirmed. For her part, Cecilia is uncertain of a marriage to a man she hasn’t even met — how could he love her? Cecelia’s father, who fulfils the Baron Sadoja role but not so inhumanly, assures her that it will come in time. The marriage is reported in the news (like in Merry-Go-Round), and Schani gloats at Mitzi, who has since rejected him. He attempts her rape and failing thus, prepares to murder Nicki. At the marriage, Cecelia is presented a bouquet of apple blossoms. Von Stroheim appears stalwart, rigid, already swamped with a waiting regret. As the recessional departs the church and approaches a waiting carriage — rain beats heavy outside — we spot Schani awaiting his rival. The year is 1914; here, telescoped into a romantic squabble, is Sarajevo — the end of empire. But Mitzi embraces Schani, and promises she will marry him if he spares Nicki. This is gruesomely satisfying; so much so that he lifts Mitizi to his shoulders so that she can see Nicki ride off into marriage. Cecelia is no fool: sat in the carriage, she mentions the woman in the crowd. Who was she? Nicki denies her. The apple blossoms. Won’t they always remind you? Stonefaced, he replies: Yes — always! We see again “The Iron Man,” cackling atop St. Stephen’s. There ends the film, in what must be the greatest of all feel-bad endings. A defeat on every front. Schani, betrothed but humiliated; Mitzi, forsaken by her lover and chained to her attacker; Cecelia, thrown into loveless marriage for her money; Nicki betraying his love, and himself. It’s tough to express the strength and the design of this film without an almost total synopsis: it is the absolute culmination of the von Stroheim idea. A beautiful, corrupt aristocracy, bending to commerce; marriage as a coupling not of lovers but of property; a violent, raging world deprived of etiquette or proper hierarchy. And one on the edge of apocalyptic war, should the Schanis of this world succeed, as they surely will. A shadowy conceit, though dappled so fragrantly.
But that is not where von Stroheim envisioned his ending. Of the 11-hour original, The Wedding March is now presented in less than two. At the time of its release, a compromise was reached, in which a second film — entitled The Honeymoon — would be extracted from the second half of the greater Wedding March. This film was so compromised, and so compressed (a quarter of an already short runtime dedicated to a “catch-up” of the previous film, so as to exist self-contained), that von Stroheim swore against it, and had it banned from release in the United States. It appeared, briefly, in South America and Europe; in 1959 the last known copy was burnt up in a fire at the Cinémathèque Française. Henri Langlois, head curator at the time, declared that it had “died voluntarily,” so debased was its remnant. In it, we would follow Nicki and Cecelia to the mountain estate of the von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburgs. In Vienna — again in St Stephens — Mitizi would faint during her marriage to Schani before the bond was sealed: Schani swears his revenge, and pursues Nicki to the mountains. Mitzi would then pursue the pursuer. Cecelia rends her wedding dress, knowing it the token of a false marriage. But, when Schani appears, gun in hand, she will put herself between the bullet and Nicki. She dies, and Schani is caught and killed by local hunters.
This much of the film is so swift, and so scrappy, that one is wont to agree with Langlois. But in its final fragment is some hint cut of anguished poetry. We see the funeral of Cecelia, and the misery of Schweisser, who sees his error, too late, too late. Nicki’s parents appear yet more depraved, pleased by how it turned out: Nicki inherits the Schweisser wealth, and can go on womanizing, as he once did. But Nicki instead seeks out the wine garden, to find his Mitzi. The place is abandoned, the apple-blossoms vanished. He wanders about, gormlessly, in the remembered place, an empty contrast of what it was. There the film would end. Romance, innocence, and all: again defeated. Nicki is not killed — again, he is not von Steuben; he must instead abide. Yet even this was not the ending as von Stroheim had written it. The true ending was never filmed, Powers shutting down production with still a third unshot. In this ending we receive that final, missing fragment of the von Stroheim mythos: the war, which must uproot this last fragment of old Vienna.
Walking through the sets with designer Richard Day, von Stroheim had said: “This is it… This is Vienna… my Vienna!”: but it cannot be the Vienna of von Stroheim without its destruction. He again stages the scene in which Emperor Josef signs the declaration of war — as he had written in Merry-Go-Round. But even regret is too performative in this version. The emperor refuses to sign. It is The Iron Man (appearing, like the White Dame, at times of peril) who puts the pen back into the emperor’s hand, and together they sign. Nicki learns that Mitzi has joined a convent, but is swiftly called up to battle. Schani — who in this unmade version of the film was not killed in the mountains — swiftly deserts, and takes up with bandits and rabble rousers in the Balkan hills. This seems a fanciful addition, but is based in history: the Green Cadres, deserters and agitators against the Austro-Hungarian state, began emerging soon after war was declared, particularly in the contested regions in the Empire’s Southeast. Schani comes to represent not only the social doom of Vienna, but its military foe. The clock of fate ticks: Nicki is assigned to the Balkan front; Schani’s bandits attack a convent; Mitzi is in that convent. Schani once more promises rape to Mitzi, but help is called! Nicki appears, and at last kills his rival. The conflict of Austria-Hungary, between revolutionary and aristocracy, has been miniaturized (and scandalized) by von Stroheim; made a fractal of his romantic drama, in which the same players hold the same spaces. But the dead Schani does not end the story with bows — here comes a third miserable valediction. Nicki cannot stay with Mitzi, but must depart into the mystery of war. Whether he returns to her, to Vienna, is unknown; if we are to suppose this man the embodiment of Alt Wien, and if we are to suppose him also an avatar for von Stroheim (who, one is sure, loved a Mitzi in Vienna), then we know he does not, cannot return. Thus ends the dream, ends Vienna, ends romance. And yet romance triumphs: it is only that which brings up this sorry tale into catharsis, into beauty. Only that.
But we speak of ghosts: this Wedding March did not come to be. We possess only a synecdoche, the first iteration of a stanza repeated, and emphasized, three times. Therein is perhaps the method and mode of von Stroheim. An artist bound to repeat, not merely the idea, but within the idea. A novelistic style, perhaps too expansive for the screen, certainly too expensive. The Wedding March, in shreds and patches, would remark von Stroheim’s final worthy statement as a director. His next film would be for Gloria Swanson’s incipient film company, a would-be epic called Queen Kelly. But von Stroheim’s spendthrift ways, and the degeneracy of that film’s content, resulted in his firing not a third into shooting. That he was making a silent film in the new age of sound did not smooth proceedings. Von Stroheim, Swanson, and Queen Kelly would be reunited 20 years later, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Much though he disliked the role — Max von Mayerling, another von, a once-great director parodying von Stroheim’s own career — it was von Stroheim who suggested the use of footage from Queen Kelly. Swanson, as Norma Desmond, croons of a lost age, of people bigger than pictures, a time of faces. Watching that footage, a last hurrah, a broken promise, perhaps the pair felt a sting additional to Wilder’s script.
After Queen Kelly, von Stroheim took on a role in a deranged, and generally atrocious, sound film, The Great Gabbo. In it he played an ambitious but acidic puppeteer — a man pretending to be another man, to a paying and delighted audience. He alienates his old partner, and though he achieves fame, it is not enough. It is never enough. He rages at his financiers, and is thereafter let go from the company. The film’s last image is that of von Stroheim, his puppet drooping just above the ground, walking under a marquee. His name — The Great Gabbo! — is being taken down, letter by letter. No image could better encapsulate the Erich von Stroheim of 1929. He had become worse than a failure: he had become a joke. In 1927, Lucien Prival played Von Strogoff in High Hat, a very angry, very foreign director. Prival would keep this act up into the ’30s; von Stroheim himself contributed to the image, playing another very angry, very foreign director in 1932’s The Lost Squadron, in which ex-WWI airmen become stunt pilots for a Hollywood movie. It seems the merger of von Stroheim with his screen conceit had taken a sinister turn. He was no longer the puppeteer, but the puppet: he had lost control of his myth, and in its many folds become ridiculous. Max von Mayerling may have played into this same vision, but in that film the absurdity meets tragedy.
No such allowance was made von Stroheim in these ember days. In the years to follow von Stroheim would demean himself, in search of that ancient demeaner: gold. His finances were, as ever, in tatters, but now without even the potential of windfall. He took on roles in poverty-row nothings: Fugitive Road, Crimson Romance, and the deliciously titled Crime of Dr. Crespi. Of these only the first is of interest, in that it implies some creative contribution from von Stroheim himself. His character is at one point introduced with a shot starting at his boots and ending at his head — a motion frequent in von Stroheim’s cinema. The film opens much in the way of von Stroheim’s unproduced remake of Blind Husbands. And his character, von Traunsee, possesses that fusion of caddish lechery and introspective contrition that distinguishes the late von Stroheim protagonist. But if director Frank R. Strayer was willing to listen to von Stroheim’s suggestions, the film remained Strayer’s: a cheap and at times outrageously bad quickie, only lifted by von Stroheim as much as the project would diminish his reputation. His destitution was not limited to the cinema. in 1933, his wife, Valerie, was disfigured in a beauty parlor fire. In 1935, his ex-wife Mae Jones sued him for failure of upkeep, a suit he could not afford. The image, the universe had shattered. Like the protagonist of In The Morning, which was his first dream of Vienna, suicide entered into his mind. The old days of Erich Oswald had reappeared in the mist.
It would be Europe, ancient, dreamt-of Europe, to rescue Erich von Stroheim from a descent into penniless ignominy. Jean Renoir, the great French director, had supposedly seen Foolish Wives 34 times — it was von Stroheim that brought him to the cinema. Now the cinema would come to von Stroheim. La Grande Illusion, the film that was to follow, would be the greatest of von Stroheim’s performances. Originally granted the choice between two German roles — an ace fighter pilot, and a prison guard — von Stroheim instead determined that the two characters should be one. The act of a canny actor, in search of lines, or that old instinct, a writerly spirit? In whichever case, the decision to fuse these roles was the right one. The role — von Rauffenstein — is a lieutenant for Germany during the Great War; an aristocrat with deep roots in the European hierarchy. A stickler for rectitude in conduct, he embodies that bizarre contradiction of form: a warrior who, when confronted with his foe, thinks first to hospitality. But he is consciously of another time, or rather, he is a monument of a time soon expiring. He shoots down a surveillance plane manned by Maréchal — a bourgeois officer, and de Boeldieu, his superior in birth and rank. Between de Boeldieu and Maréchal is a sometimes frosty association, whereas between Boeldieu and Rauffenstein is a fraternity. Even so long after the ashes of the Revolution, there is a recognition of the old families, between whom — even in warfare — lies a genetic tie. Renoir creates the European divide, and the European disintegration: these post-feudal arrangements are an archaism, soon to be replaced by ideas of nationalism, and beyond the nation, of class fellowship. Maréchal, while awkward beside Boeldieu, befriends Rosenthal, a Jew whose French identity does not rely upon familial bond or antique crest.
In some regard, this film is the antonym of the von Stroheim picture. Not only does it anticipate, but it celebrates the collapse of the European palace, seeing instead the substance of a new society. But for all its socialistic optimism, there is also a sentimentalism to Renoir’s piece. He does not resent the old masters, but makes of them a kind of tragedy. Von Stroheim, first introduced as a fighter pilot, is next seen much later in the film, now a prison commander, a brace wrapped around his neck. This gallant warrior has been struck down, reduced to an administrative service, broken by the war. He holds on, on to that which he holds dear, those olden traditions. The prison is itself a castle, constructed across the various centuries of German history, though within it is housed the acme of modernity. The Maxim gun, whose democratization of the battlefield spells an end to that most glorious image of war. In a moment suddenly, quietly moving, von Rauffenstein reminisces: he thinks to Maxim’s, in Paris, and to a girl he knew there: Fifi. In this, one thinks not to von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow, but to Lubitsch’s. There, he remade Maxim’s, and there, within, a girl called Fifi. Perhaps the same girl? A more beautiful time, for those born in the right rooms, for those entrusted with the keys and the scepters. This sorrow is not just that of von Rauffenstein, but that of von Stroheim: here he and his character become as one, both mourning the doom of the ancien régime, and recognizing the very moment of its finale. One might read the metaphor further: that von Stroheim, as the young director of silent cinema, was that fighter pilot, and that — reduced to cheap acting roles in sound films — he was now that prison guard. A debasement of nobility, however one wishes to contextualize it.
Von Stroheim’s own cinema does, in segments, leak into Renoir’s. The private room of von Rauffenstein — the chapel of the old castle — is decorated with many objects suggestive of the von Stroheim legend, Casanova’s Memoirs not the least. But most important is the geranium, that lights against a window. The castle’s only flower. This is an image that originates beyond Stroheim. Instead it is Griffith, the director most admired by Stroheim, who had created it. Intolerance features a “hopeful geranium,” looked to by Mae Murray; in Broken Blossoms, the geranium becomes an ambition, unaffordable behind a storefront. Von Stroheim inherited the symbol: in Queen Kelly, one sits by Prince Wolfram’s window, a symbol resisting the incarceration of the mad queen. Now von Stroheim passes it to Renoir, that image of fleeting hope, of the last scion of a great and withering tree.
But it is, per the title, an illusion. For von Stroheim it also always been such: the whole of his existence, the basis of his philosophy, the phantom of his art. De Boeldieu betrays von Rauffenstein, and abets his comrades in fleeing the prison: in doing so, he forsakes the old ways, ushering in the new. Von Rauffenstein is forced to shoot him, but it is a sombre scene. Boeldieu is taken to the castle to be treated, but it is too late. Dying, he looks to Rauffenstein: “Of the two of us, I am to be pitied least. For me it will be over… soon. But you have to carry on. Carry on a futile existence… To be killed in war is tragic for a commoner. For you… and me… it’s a good way out.” Von Rauffenstein, speaking as much for himself as for von Stroheim: “I missed my chance.” De Boeldieu dies, and von Rauffenstein walks to his hopeful geranium, snipping it at the last. So ends the illusion, so ends the aristocracy, the old Europe; out which walks this crooked ghost, his time finished, his purpose spent. Erich von Stroheim began his career acting Germans in the Great War. They were crude, evil caricatures, targets to be shot at. In the ending of his career, he once again acts a German in the Great War. But now he is afforded a dignity, and more than dignity, self-knowledge. The same war, the same battlefields, the same persona. But all of them different. To borrow the words of Eliot:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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