When you put it like that ... Of course back then, the news of a new movie by Erich von Stroheim was a major event, not least because the public loved reading about the antics of this beleaguered upstart genius. Sixty years before "Heaven’s Gate," Stroheim built Monte Carlo in California for “Foolish Wives,” bought his actors expensive couture so they’d feel wealthy, insisted he be allowed to eat caviar and drink real champagne on screen, and in the best touch of all, invented a book out of thin air and insisted the movie was adapted from it. Better still, his character, charlatan Count Karamzin sees a diplomat's wife played by Miss DuPont (birth name Patricia Hannon) reading the novel, takes it out of her hands, inspects it, and says “Very good.” And he’s right to say it. Even the intertitles—“Again Morning ... Sapphire sea ... Brutality of man ... and still the sun”—are pure poetry. There was quite simply no one else like him, and even now, 100 years later, no movie quite like “Foolish Wives.”
In 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum complained that most writing about the legendary Austrian film director and actor Erich von Stroheim got caught up in legends, in the fiction surrounding the teutonic magpie. No one seemed capable of writing about his movies as works of visual art. Of course, and Rosenbaum concedes as much, this is tough because Stroheim was bigger than life, and he made sure everyone knew it.
Young Erich Oswald Stroheim got off a boat to America after fleeing from a dispiriting 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. Nevertheless he worked menial labor jobs in the heartland before making his way to Hollywood, where he worked his way up from stuntman and assistant to the biggest director and star in the world. It all came crashing down because he tortured everyone while directing, wasted millions of studio money, and refused to make movies less than a full night long. He lied to every reporter he ever talked to, and there were many, to the point that most of his obituaries were running on old half-truths and got crucial details about his life wrong. He spoke with a variety of accents by which everyone who heard it was confused, each believing it betrayed a different region, class, and history.
Stroheim was like the negative image of Charlie Chaplin, a count with no court, and the image of him that survives is as much of the depressive butler hiding behind history with Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” or the iron jawed idealist running the POW camp in Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion.” Just as he used association with D.W. Griffith to his advantage, he was one of the first totems of cinephilia collected by eager young directors desperate to bask in the glow of the image of his twisted genius, a precursor to Peter Bogdanovich’s relationship to Orson Welles, Wim Wenders to Nicholas Ray, and Bogdanovich’s own relationship to Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.
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