Once upon a time, there was a print of Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives that was more than six hours long. A few people are reputed to have seen the film in its extended version. I extend my sympathies to those victims of von Stroheim's megalomania. The 2020 restoration of Foolish Wives is two hours and twenty-seven minutes and, I think any reasonable person would agree that this is more than enough. Stroheim, who was both a great fraud and a great director, is indisputably some kind of cinema genius, but if perfection in art involves proportion and self-discipline, the man and his work are woefully inadequate. Film flourishes on excess, however, and, in that context, anyone interested in cinema should endure his movies in as a long a version as presently exists -- the experience may not be particularly pleasant, but great art doesn't exist to be convenient or merely entertaining. Wagner's operas, Hamlet, and any other number of examples that I could cite (and you could too) are examples of great works of art that are profoundly inconvenient and make disturbing claims on our time and attention. Stroheim's insanely ambitious productions (Foolish Wives, Greed, and Queen Kelly) fall into this category and pose interesting questions about the importance (and limitations) of realism in movies. I could sense that Foolish Wives is a great work within its first five minutes -- but it's very hard to explain in any coherent way why this is true.
In simplest terms, Foolish Wives involves the machinations of a fake Russian aristocrat (Wradislaus Sergius Karamzin -- played by Stroheim) and his two "cousins", apparently common criminals and most likely former prostitutes, as they scheme to defraud a wealthy American woman. The story is set in Monte Carlo where the 21 year old woman is visiting with her older husband, a forty-one year old American ambassador. Karamzin is a gambler and libertine, operating under false auspices, and running out of luck. One of his mistresses, the two ostensible Russian princesses posing as his cousins, recommends to Karamzin that he seduce the wealthy American wife and separate her from her money. Karamzin is an all-purpose villain and one supposes that the original cut of the movie featured him exercising his perfidy in every imaginable sphere of activity. Here we see him passing counterfeit currency, lying to his much-abused maid (he has implausibly promised to marry her), plotting to seduce and steal from the American woman, and attempting to rape a mentally disabled young girl. Who knows what kinds of other mischief he committed in the three hours of the movie that have now gone missing? (Probably, he abused animals, kicked children, and peddled opium to school girls.) The bulk of the narrative as the film now exists involves the plot to defraud the American woman, Mrs. Hughes, and cuckold her husband, the rather goofy, if endearing, ambassador. This scheme involves an initial encounter with the woman on the terrace of a luxury hotel, a trip to what seems like the Tyrolean Alps involving a savage thunderstorm, and, then, an attempt to seduce or rape the woman in the villain's enormous chateau, the Villa Amorosa. Karamzin is so nasty and depraved that he seems to commit bad acts for the sheer hell of it -- one of the "cousins" has to remind him that the objective is "not the woman but her money." Mrs. Hughes is reading a novel written by one Erich von Stroheim called Foolish Wives, apparently an account of the narrative projected before us -- one wonders why the foolish wife doesn't skip to the end of the book to find out how things turn out. Karamzin lures Mrs. Hughes to the Villa Amorosa, leads her into the place's fairy-tale tower, (Rapunzel,Rapunzel, let down your long hair) and is about to extract some sex and 90,000 francs from her, when Maruschka, his morose maid, locks the couple in the villain's bedroom and lights the place on fire. (Here the restoration recreates spectacular color effects that were used in the original film -- the fire of the candles that are part of Karamzin's furniture for seduction and the blaze at the villa are all hand-colored a vibrant, flickering orange; some of the firetrucks are steam-powered and have boilers heated by ovens -- the fire in those ovens is also hand-colored.) Karamzin escapes from the blaze although he is disgraced by leaping off the tower's lofty balcony before attempting to save Mrs. Hughes -- he blithely says that he jumped first to show Mrs. Hughes how it was to be done. Mr. Hughes, the ambassador, finally figures out what's going on. He confronts the skulking Karamzin and gives him a good hard punch in the nose -- after first gentlemanly asking him to remove his monocle. Poor Maruschka goes to some nearby sea-cliffs and kills herself by diving off the ledge to her death, another spectacular scene tinted deep blue and featuring dramatic silhouettes of the doomed woman against coastal mountains and the sea. Karamzin knows the jig is up and, so, thwarted in his schemes against Mrs. Hughes, he goes to the counterfeiter's garret in a disreputable and squalid part of town, climbs up the wall to enter the home through an upper window, and proceeds to rape (or attempt to rape) the forger's mentally challenged (as we say today) daughter. For his pains, the counterfeiter kills Karamzin and dumps his corpse in a particularly noisome sewer nearby -- we've earlier seen Karmzin hustling past the open sewer shaft, covering his nose with a scented handkerchief; pigs and chickens are wandering about the sewer and, in a previous scene, we have been shown the denizens of the slum cleaning out the sewer by extracting buckets full of filth from the hole. (In the original print, Karamzin was merely playing 'possum and, apparently, revived in the sewer only to be killed by some sort of monster mollusc -- it's probably fortunate that his sequence is lost, although one would desire to know what it looked like.) Karamzin's "cousins", attempting to decamp from the half burned-out Villa Amorosa, are detained and have their glamorous blonde wigs torn off -- they are revealed to be wanted criminals on the lam. The ambassador Hughes, at last gets in bed with his wife (she has rebuffed him before) and reads to her the closing paragraph of Foolish Wives, the novel -- a text that says "The Man for the American Woman is the American Man," presumably the moral of the work, something like saying that the theme of Citizen Kane is that little boys who lose their sleds when young will grow up to be great men and great criminals.)
As should be apparent from the summary above, the story is not the aspect of the film that makes it astonishing and still compelling (if infuriating) watching 100 years after it was made. Rather, it is the innumerable strange and startling details, the little "touches" with which Stroheim decorates his rather conventional and formulaic melodrama. The picture is full of weird images and bizarre figures, often immensely elaborated. Villa Amorosa is a huge hulk of chateau, full of peculiar smoking braziers leaking incense into the air corrupted by the villains -- Stroheim's movies are so vivid that you seem to be able to smell them: we have no doubt what the sewer in the slums smells like. Karamzin is first seen firing his pistol from atop some sea-cliffs, peppering a little target about six feet from under his nose with bullet holes. We see him in profile, as a heroic if oddly shaped figure, against sky and sea. And, he turns the gun on the camera and shoots us right in the face. For breakfast, he has an "eye-opener" of "ox blood", a decoction so vile that even this villain can scarcely swallow it. This is followed by heaping servings of "caviar for cereal" as a title informs us. Like his hero, with whom he clearly identifies, Stroheim is incapable of any kind of economy --when the counterfeiter, Ventucci, warns Karamzin that his daughter is "everything to him" since her mother has died, he has to cut away to insert shot of the deceased mother in a portrait photo, an entirely gratuitous gesture. Karamzin's initial encounter with the pathetic young woman (she is clutching a toy doll) involves him smirking as he eyes her from foot to toe in a repeated shots and, it seems, that, as implausible as it might seem, he is plotting to lure her into a side room at the Villa to rape her as his "cousins" entertain Ventucci. These sequences go on and on pointlessly, although the sheer accumulation of detail creates a powerful sense that what we are seeing is somehow realistic, although actually merely plot contrivances in a melodramatic and implausible narrative. A couple of examples of Stroheim's profligacy will suffice to suggest the tone of the picture. In one scene, Maruschka, who Karamzin has apparently been sexually abusing since she was 12 -- she has been in the service of the fake Count for twenty years -- pleads with the villain to perform his promise and marry him. Maruschka is homely, shapeless, and a wholly unattractive figure. But she has saved up 3000 francs during her 20 years of abuse by Karamzin (and his "cousins") and the villain wants her money. He feigns tears by dipping his fingers in bowl full of water and causing his eyes to drip onto the place setting at the table -- there are about 12 shots of this ruse. Maruschka reacts (about ten shots) and, then, goes to get her pathetic life-savings. The camera follows her in a couple of shots through the shadowy and baroque interior of the villa -- lots of odd niches and grotesque statues and smelly braziers. She returns with the money that Karamzin, then, caresses, far more gently and with more love, than he ever used when touching the poor maid -- this comprises another half-dozen shots. Stroheim is a master of composition and camera placement and makes every shot interesting with incidental detail poking out of corner -- for instance, there are Borzoi dogs, pigs, chickens, and poodles in some scenes or strange household artifacts (in the scene with Maruschka there's an ornate cut-glass vase on the table and a bizarre tall pewter vessel at the edge of the shot.) In this scene in which Karamazin defrauds Maruschka several shots feature a vertical element, usually shadowy and hard to interpret, smack-dab in the middle of the frame. At the end of the Maruschka sequence, Stroheim shows the villain enjoying the bright Mediterranean sun on the right side of the frame while the left part of the image where the maid is located is cloaked in gloom. A scene in which Karamazin advances on the idiot daughter of the counterfeiter features beams of light with motes of dust dancing wildly in them, an amazing effect for a 1922 picture. When Karamzin takes Mrs.Hughes to the Tyrolean Alps (it seems), there's a violent thunderstorm with lightning-strikes like a military bombardment -- trees dissolve into gouts of smoke and fire. Karamazin tries to cross a river or lagoon (the bridge has been blown to pieces) but his boat sinks and he has to carry the inert Mrs. Hughes through a swamp to a hovel in the woods. The hovel is inhabited by a disfigured old woman, apparently some kind of witch, with her familiar a pesky goat. Karamzin has Mrs. Hughes disrobe to get into dry clothes (the witches' garments?) and salaciously watches her taking off her clothes using a pocket mirror. The hideous witch falls asleep and, just as Karamzin is about to rape the unconscious Mrs. Hughes, a monk appears, also a monstrous figure with huge staring eyes -- he seems to be completely mad. There follow about ten minutes of shots displaying Karamzin's frustration at being thwarted in his sexual schemes by the insane monk. Stroheim is wildly narcissistic but also capable of playing for laughs -- Karamzin twiddles his thumbs, acts petulant like a school boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and his mouth twitches, sometimes, he licks his lips like a snake darting out its tongue. For some inexplicable reason, Stroheim intercuts the scene with the unconscious Mrs. Hughes, the sleeping witch, and the grotesque monk with shots of a bedraggled owl outside in the storm (the hovel's windows are continuously flashing with lightning) and two frogs -- one presumes that Stroheim wanted to film the frogs copulating but either the amphibians were not in the mood or the censor removed this shot. Most directors would spend about three minutes with a scene of this sort -- in Foolish Wives, the sequence goes on and on without respite for about ten minutes or more. Another curious aspect of the movie is that Stroheim, anticipating sound films, often films entirely dialogues between characters in extended shots, but without any titles. (The film's titles are like Emily Dickinson on dexadrine, all hyphenated effusions --- "The light of the sea -- cars honking -- blood red flowers -- the brutality of man -- and still the sea and sun" (I've improvised this example but it's true to the form of the titles.)
When he wants to stage a complex action scene after the manner of D. W. Griffith, Stroheim can match his master. (He worked as an extra in Birth of a Nation). The fire scenes are cross-cut with the seduction efforts by Karamzin in the tower boudoir, and, also, interspersed with images of the husband about to be cuckolded back at the hotel, Maruschka dancing about wildly as she sets the fire and escapes, and the fire engines rushing to the scene of the blaze, shot like Griffith's Ku Klux Klansmen riding to the rescue in Birth of a Nation. This is all thrilling and effectively presented. The actors are brilliantly cast -- Mr. Hughes has an expressive mobile face, a bit like Fred Gwynne and an oddly androgynous aspect; he's not exactly manly and when doting on his young wife (who thwarts his advances by smearing her face with cold cream) he seems a bit like an ingenue batting his big eyes and with a little bee-sting mouth. The counterfeiter is a filthy old man who lives like the wood carver Geppetto in a garret full of masks and strange figurines. (He sleeps under a big picture of a Saint pointing into his heart in his open thorax.) Mrs. Andrews isn't attractive -- she has a strange squashed-looking face and, as per the fashion of the times, all of them women seem to have their breasts bound flat against their chests. Stroheim populates the screen with cripples, horribly wounded and maimed soldiers, hunchbacks, and sinister beggars. There is a sad-faced clownish army officer who seems to be mooning over Mrs. Andrews. She cruelly mocks him when he doesn't pick up a shawl she has dropped -- but, of course, he can't pick anything up because he has no arms. Stroheim's character is skinny and physically unprepossessing -- he seems a kind of malevolent runt or weasel. It's unclear why women desire him, although it seems to be his smirk and his self-confidence that they find attractive. He looks like trouble and he is trouble. The movie has completely absurd sets, constructed on a massive scale, apparently at Carmel-on-the Sea on the Monterrey peninsula. For some reason, Stroheim felt in mandatory to create a full-scale mock-up of the casinos at Monte Carlo, places used primarily as background in only a couple of shots. The huge Villa Amorosa seems to be also constructed as a fully functional chateau; it probably has toilets that really flush. The expense is completely pointless although many shots are spectacular -- the screen is full of promenading tourists in elaborate costume, military officers, whole platoons of cavalry, crowds of cripples and beggars as if visualized in a Brueghel or Bosch painting. In one lavish night scene, tinted deep indigo, the cousins inveigle Mr. Andrews on one gondola while Mrs. Andrews and Karamzin canoodle in another vessel of the same kind. The gondolas are covered in vine and flowers and loll about a lagoon where there are another fifty of sixty similar boats in front of a lavish neo-classical facade lit from below -- fireworks burst from some of the gondolas creating fountains of sparks. It's incredibly lavish and ridiculously opulent. None of this is necessary for a nasty little domestic melodrama, more akin to something like The Grifters than to Gone with the Wind. (This is same phenomenon visible in the lavish films made at UFA during the silent era in Germany. I have remarked upon Joe May's Asphalt made in 1929 that features a full-scale mock-up of several blocks in downtown Berlin complete with a thousand extras and sixty vehicles -- a completely unnecessary extravagance in light of the rather humble subject matter of the film.)
The Flicker Alley DVD of Foolish Wives is beautifully realized, replete with extras, and the film is itself is splendidly reconstructed. That said, there are obvious lacunae -- for instance, we see Karamzin climbing up to rape the counterfeiter's daughter; he clambers up some vines by a full-scale statue of a saint in a niche. The next scene shows him apparently dead and being dragged out of the garret by his feet. On the evidence of the rest of the film (and Stroheim's other movies), there must have been a horrific murder scene, probably about ten minutes long -- but it is nowhere to be seen. A few shots are still frames, masked with a sort of grid, apparently a device to show us what is missing, but, like a professional piece of art restoration, made in such a way as to inform us that this image is not original to the film but has been spliced in to complete the sequence. The film is a kind of self-portrait -- Stroheim pretended to be a Prussian military officer, but he was, in fact, a Viennese Jew who fled Austria to avoid the draft. Biographers portray him as a narcissistic, misogynistic con-man. So Karamzin is a thinly veiled representation of the director and the movie, on some level, is his confession.
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