The life of Erich von Stroheim seems to have been ready-made for film noir. Anthony Mann’s superbly hectic yet downbeat noir “The Great Flamarion,” from 1945 (which I discuss in this clip), in which Stroheim stars, reveals both his high veneer and the irreparable damage it bore. Stroheim is one of the greatest of all directors—the inventor of a high-decadent style that both revels in its sumptuousness and bares its moral rot—and the extravagance of his vision was matched by an extravagance with his means. By 1930, he was almost unable to get work as a director, and worked as an actor instead (as he had done in some of his own films). He’s an extraordinary actor, of course, embodying the very essence of decadently refined Austro-Hungarian aristocracy and authoritarian Teutonic severity, as the situation demands. In Mann’s highly inventive low-budget film, Stroheim plays an artist whose severe self-discipline and exacting standards come at a high price: isolation, naïveté, and vulnerability. It’s Mann’s film, but Stroheim’s performance, character, and story are so powerful and so exemplary that his very presence in a movie makes it his own—a reflection of his life as well as of his art, on both sides of the camera.
P.S. This Sunday, Film Forum is beginning a series of Stroheim’s films with “Greed,” from 1924, which I write about in the magazine this week.
