In the clip above, I discuss Erich von Stroheim’s “Foolish Wives,” shot—for almost a year—in 1920 and 1921, and released in 1922. No one would mistake S. J. Perelman, one of America’s greatest comic writers and screenwriters, for a film critic, but his 1952 appreciation, in the pages of The New Yorker (available to subscribers), of Stroheim’s silent classic is both a laugh riot and a fascinatingly skewed but perceptive take on Stroheim’s art. He writes of it as the film that “canonized” the director-actor for him, and describes the powerful impression that Stroheim’s starring performance, as the predatory, penniless, domineering Count Sergius Karamzin, had made on him:
Perelman’s reconsideration of the film depended on the kind of extreme measures that were needed in an age before repertory cinemas and home video:
The comedian, accustomed to the humming machinery of Hollywood’s maturity (in which he had become a fairly intermittent toiler), saw “Foolish Wives” as an old movie that was the victim of changing styles; he looked upon it as he might have looked upon a former Gibson Girl, now shapeless and wizened, who happened to stroll into his office in her once-trendy garb. But here’s how, despite his failure to enjoy Stroheim’s visual and dramatic achievement in revival, he sums up the filmmaker’s singular moral (or immoral) vision:
The silencing of von Stroheim as a director—his last work was shared with Alan Crosland, in 1933; the last movie truly his own was “Queen Kelly,” from 1929—is one of the tragedies, or, rather, crimes of Hollywood, of a piece with the sudden end of D. W. Griffith’s career and the dwindling of Orson Welles’s. (In a 1941 interview, he referred to “Hollywood’s boycott” of him as a director.) Stroheim—born in 1885 to a petit-bourgeois Jewish family in Vienna—was no titled aristocrat (just an aristocrat of the mind), and, coming of age as an artist in the over-the-top luxuries of Hollywood’s first flourish, was expert in both the pretenses and the revels that he filmed. (I talk a little about that in a capsule review of the film.) Stroheim was publicized, in his heyday, as “The Man You Love to Hate,” but he was also the man who knew too much.