DVD of the Week: Foolish Wives

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:

For six months afterward, I exhibited a maddening tendency to click my heels and murmur “Bitte?” along with a facial tic as though a monocle were screwed into my eye. The mannerisms finally abated, but not until the Dean of Brown University had taken me aside and confided that if I wanted to transfer to Heidelberg, the faculty would not stand in my way.

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:

Not long ago, the Museum of Modern Art graciously permitted me to run its copy of “Foolish Wives,” on condition that if I became overstimulated or mushy, I would not pick the veneer off the chairs or kiss the projectionist. Such fears, it presently turned out, were baseless. The showing roused me to neither vandalism nor affection; in fact, it begot such apathy that I had to be given artificial respiration and sent home in a wheelbarrow.

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:

When he set out to limn a louse, he put his back into it. He never palliated his villainy, never helped old ladies across the street to show that he was a sweet kid au fond or prated about his Oedipus complex like the Percy boys who portray heavies today…. Von Stroheim not only kicked the dog; he kicked the owner and the S.P.C.A. for good measure. With the things he has on his conscience, I don’t suppose the man ever sleeps a wink.

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.