The Merry Widow

The Merry Widow – This 1925 film by Erich von Stroheim is that director’s only box-office hit. Irving Thalberg produced the picture, clashed repeatedly with Stroheim, who he fired and, then, rehired. The film is successful as a large-scale, glamorous entertainment and notable for preserving some of the more acrid aspects of Stroheim’s misogynistic, misanthropic, and morbid realism. The ending, in particular, seems manufactured by the Hollywood moguls (although I know it to be generally consistent with the Lehar operetta) – Stroheim’s picture seems to end in a satisfyingly nasty way: all the principals are dead, destroyed, or dying. Thalberg insisted on a Happy Ending, a grandiose wedding ceremony in the elephantine cathedral of Monte Blanco – a Balkan Ruritania seemingly modeled on Montenegro. That sequence apparently was shot in an early color process, but the Technicolor version has been lost. The picture is typical of Stroheim’s profligate style – everything is too large, outsized for a plot that is relatively trivial and, in fact, similar in some respects to movies like The Graduate. Stroheim creates massive sets crowded with people, but his protagonists are petty, grotesque, diseased-looking human gargoyles. Some of Stroheim’s characteristic, and obsessive themes emerge with distinctive clarity in this picture. The opening four reels involves a primordial clash pitting pure virginity, embodied in Mae Murray, the ingénue, against nightmarish depravity. Mae Murray is an Irish-American Broadway danseuse (to quote the titles) incongruously touring the Balkan state of Monte Blanco. The army is on maneuvers – Stroheim stages elaborate parades with hundreds of extras – and billeted in a provincial village. The Prince, played by John Gilbert, is first shown in his military vehicle smirking at pornography shown to him by an aid-de-camp. The Prince has an even more lecherous brother, the Crown Prince Mirko, and the two men, both of whom seem evil seducers, compete for the affections of the leading lady. Mae Murray bats her eyes and has porcelain skin and she acts surprised when Gilbert’s character tries to paw her on their first date. Typically, a first date that begins with an invitation to a private room at a brothel, where oysters and caviar are served on massive blocks of ice, and involving serenades by naked blindfolded women playing their instruments in a huge bed in a curtained alcove, should probably not be construed as anything but an inducement for an orgy – but the heroine acts surprised, as if she was expecting a church picnic at the Francoise – the whore house where Gilbert takes her. (These kinds of scenes are filmed with immense gusto and inventiveness by Stroheim.) Murray rejects the Prince’s caresses – she is constantly shown in front of lurid-looking religious icons inexplicably littering the brothel. But she falls in love with him. Mirko thwarts the nascent love affair and the Prince’s degenerate parents refuse to allow him to marry the American performer. Distraught, she gets her revenge by marrying the syphilitic banker, a crippled Baron whose face is disfigured by chancre-sores and who hobbles about on crutches – he is a foot-fetishist to boot. Tully Marshal’s performance as this monster is spectacularly loathsome. On her wedding night, fortunately, the Banker drops dead – possibly killed by sex with the heroine or, in the alternative, simply shocked into apoplexy by the transparent black negligee that the ostensibly disgusted heroine wears. The “Merry Widow” decamps to Paris and Maxims where she frolics with lesbians and show-girls and, ultimately, induces a duel between the alcoholic Prince and Crown Prince Mirko. The Prince who still loves the Merry Widow fires his dueling pistol into the air so as not to harm her beloved and Mirko responds by gunning his adversary down. And that’s where the picture seems designed to end. Stroheim was later to explore the imagery of a pure virgin catapulted into a whorehouse and forced into intercourse with deformed monsters in even more lurid detail in Queen Kelly. Joe Kennedy who was bankrolling that project got a gander at some of the footage involving his girlfriend, Gloria Swanson and pulled the plug – although the fragments of that film remain weirdly effective and profoundly disturbing. The Merry Widow is sophisticated and, even, realistic in its details – the characters are all deeply flawed and Mae Murray is effective in her transformation from a tough-talking but innocent and gamine heroine to a bitch-goddess. The climactic waltz seen is lusciously scored to the famous Merry Widow Waltz but consists of nothing but nasty repartee between the two principal characters. Nothing is as you expect it – at least, until the tawdry happy ending and, even, that is rendered problematic by the wedding taking place in dense chiaroscuro in a vast, grotto-like cathedral adorned with a gory image of the crucified Christ that seems to be about four stories tall. (I observe an error on Wikipedia page for Anielka Elter; she is a Czech actress who made a number of films during the silent era, but is best known for appearing in The Merry Widow as a blindfolded musician, not as the entry has it a “blind musician.”)