Create the Legend: Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives | Features | Pretty Reel

In 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum complained that much of the writing about legendary Austrian director and actor Erich von Stroheim was caught up in the legends, in the fiction surrounding the Teutonic magpie. Nobody seemed able to write about his films as works of visual art. Of course, and Rosenbaum concedes, it’s hard because Stroheim was larger than life, and he made sure everyone knew that.

Young Erich Oswald Stroheim got off a boat for America after fleeing a disheartening stint in German military service, changed his name to Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim und Nordenwall and introduced himself as a count, a son of the aristocracy. Nonetheless, he worked menial jobs in the heartland before heading to Hollywood, where he rose through the ranks from stuntman and assistant to the world’s biggest director and star. It all fell apart because he tortured everyone during the making, wasted millions of studio money, and refused to make movies shorter than a full night. He lied to every reporter he spoke to, and there were plenty of them, to the point that most of his obituaries relied on old half-truths and got crucial details about his life wrong. He spoke in a variety of accents in which all who heard him were confused, each believing he betrayed a different region, class, and history.

Stroheim was like the negative image of Charlie Chaplin, a count without a court, and the image of him that survives is as much that of the depressive butler hidden behind the story with Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” or the Iron-jawed idealist running the POW camp in Jean Renoir’s “Grande Illusion.” Just as he used the association with DW Griffith to his advantage, he was one of the first totems of cinephilia collected by young directors eager to bask in the glow of the image of his twisted genius, precursor to the Peter Bogdanovich’s relationship with Orson Welles, Wim Wenders with Nicholas Ray, and Bogdanovich’s own relationship with Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

For a time, in very different times, Erich von Stroheim was a household name in America. I heard about him in an episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” in which a shot of dozens of cans of porn in Ed Wood’s “The Sinister Urge” is met with the remark, “Ah, it’s ‘Greed’. by Erich von Stroheim. I watched it and discovered the legendary lost masterpiece of American cinema, a ten hour western melodrama only watched by the director and his friend Rex Ingram before they cut it down to four and a half hours . “. It was kicked out of the cut room and the two and a half hour cut they put out is the only version that survived. Stroheim’s career never recovered. And just a few years before he was on top of the world. He worked as an actor in propaganda films, playing furious German maniacs to help sway public opinion during World War I, which put him in the good graces of Universal head Carl Laemmle. Laemmle agreed to let him direct his first feature, which also happened to play a rising young actor named Erich von Stroh eim, based on a book no one seemed able to track down by a brilliant author named Erich von Stroheim. It was a success. The Kanye West of the 1920s had arrived.

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Create the Legend: Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives | Features | Pretty Reel