Blind Husbands (Universal "Jewel," 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 15) my husband Charles and I finally ended up watching a quite interesting silent film from Universal in 1919, Blind Husbands, Erich von Stroheim’s first film as a director. For the year and a half between the U.S.’s entry into World War I in April 1917 and the Armistice in November 1918, Stroheim had done a land-office business portraying dastardly Hun villains in patriotic movies supporting the war effort. In fact, he’d been so popular in roles like this that the publicity department of Universal, the studio that had him under contract, coined the slogan “The Man You Love to Hate.” Once the war ended, Stroheim realized that the market for these types of roles would quickly dry up, and he searched for something else he could do. What he came up with was a mountaineering film – which had become the mainstay of the German film industry the way Westerns were the mainstay of America’s – in which he would play Austrian cavalry lieutenant Erich von Steuben (a name obviously derived both from Stroheim’s own and the Prussian military officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, whom George Washington brought in as a military advisor in 1778 to help win the American Revolution), who’s been stationed to the village of Cortina on the Italian-Swiss border. Stroheim would also direct the film himself and would write the screenplay based on an original story called The Pinnacle, after the mountain the characters seek to climb. It would be a romantic triangle in which Dr. Robert Armstrong (Sam de Grasse) would take his wife Margaret (Francelia Billington) to Cortina, where they had spent their honeymoon years before. Alas, by the time the action in the film takes place the Armstrongs have become bored with each other, which leaves Margaret the proverbial sitting duck for the amorous attentions of Lt. von Steuben – who’s described in one of Lillian Ducey’s intertitles as interested in “wine, WOMEN and song.” We’ve already seen him cruising a waitress (Fay Holderness) at the Cortina hotel’s café, and she understandably gets jealous at the attention he’s now paying to Mrs. Armstrong.

Also in the mix are a young honeymooning couple (Jack Perrin and Valerie Germonprez, who was then Mrs. Erich von Stroheim), a local mountain guide named Sepp (Gibson Gowland, billed as “T. H. Gibson-Gowland” and later the star of Stroheim’s ill-fated adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague, Greed), three foolhardy Americans (William De Vaull, Jack Mathis and Percy Challenger) who insist on attempting to climb the north side of The Pinnacle despite Sepp’s warnings and pay the ultimate price for doing so, and a whole regiment of Austrian cavalry officers there to map the mountain. Stroheim originally wanted to call the film The Pinnacle, but Universal president Carl Laemmle thought that would make it seem like a movie about the card game pinochle. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” page, 42 alternate titles were suggested and whittled down to a final eight, from which exhibitors selected Blind Husbands. (Later Stroheim would make another film for Universal in which he played an unscrupulous Army officer – albeit a Russian forced to flee the Revolution – who attempts to seduce the wife of an American tourist in Monaco, and would call it Foolish Wives.) The titles claim it was based on a novel Stroheim wrote called The Pinnacle, but I’ve seen no further evidence that such a book existed and this might have just been Stroheim’s way of sneaking his preferred title onto the film. The original cut of Blind Husbands ran 102 minutes, but for years the only version extant was a cut-down 78-minute reissue Universal prepared in 1924, after Stroheim had left the studio. The version we were watching came from a 2003 DVD by Kino and ran about 93 minutes (though that may just be the 78-minute version slowed down to the original silent-era projection speed), and I’ve read online that in 2022 an Austrian print of the full-length version was just discovered and used as the basis for a complete restoration.

What’s most remarkable about Blind Husbands today is how contemporary it seems in its honest depiction of human sexuality, even though Charles faulted it for its censor-driven understatement; 1919 audiences would have found it shockingly indecent that von Steuben helps Mrs. Armstrong put on her scarf, while in 2023 that seems like no big deal. As I’ve written before about actor-directors, they seem to get understated performances from their casts even if as actors they were unmitigated hams, like Stroheim and Orson Welles. The film is virtually free from the hysterical overacting that was endemic to silent movies generally (partially because that was the style acting schools taught then, and partially because a lot of silent actors thought they had to exaggerate their gestures to compensate for not having dialogue), and for once the title forced onto the filmmakers by others actually makes sense. Sam de Grasse is literally a “blind husband,” oblivious to von Steuben’s real motives towards his wife; in one scene he even tells von Steuben to take care of Mrs. Armstrong while he goes off to attend to the three Americans who fell to their deaths (though of course he doesn’t know they are already dead until he actually reaches them) on the north side of The Pinnacle. There are lots of subtle touches that would have been beyond most filmmakers (aside from Stroheim’s mentor, D. W. Griffith, and his close friend Rex Ingram) in 1919, including the sprig of edelweiss von Steuben sends Mrs. Armstrong as part of his attempted seduction of her. (I’ve long loved the irony of the difference between the use of edelweiss in this film and its role in the other most famous movie referencing it, The Sound of Music. There’s yet another film involving edelweiss, the 1937 Hollywood parody Stand-In, in which Fritz Feld plays a crazy director, obviously based on von Stroheim, who complains that the edelweiss he’s been given for a scene is fake and demands real edelweiss. When he’s told they’ll have to send to Switzerland for it and it will take months to arrive, he folds his arms across his chest and says, “I can vait.”) Von Steuben presents the edelweiss to Margaret in an elaborate wooden box he's bought from a shoemaker and antiques dealer named "Josef Kainz." The real Josef Kainz was a German-Jewish actor who had formerly run the Munich Art Theatre and been one of the Gay Bavarian King Ludwig II's lovers. Later he retired to Vienna and ran an acting school, where Erich von Stroheim was a student.

The finale takes place on The Pinnacle, which Dr. Armstrong and von Steuben are climbing together – Dr. Armstrong actually was ready to leave the night before once he discovered von Steuben’s real intentions towards his wife, but Margaret talked him out of it and said they shouldn’t leave until he’d actually climbed The Pinnacle – when Armstrong sees a letter his wife wrote to von Steuben. The letter blows away before Dr. Armstrong can read it, but he demands to know if the letter was an offer from Margaret to run off with von Steuben. Out of whatever motives – sheer arrogance or gall – von Steuben says yes. Then Armstrong cuts the rope linking him with von Steuben and leaves him to make it down The Pinnacle as best he can. Vultures start flying around von Steuben (a sign of impending doom Stroheim would use again at the climax of Greed, also a scene about two romantic rivals stranded in a forbidding natural location) and he eventually takes a surprisingly unconvincing fall down the mountain (obviously done with a dummy instead of a live stunt person). Then Armstrong successfully makes it down, though he has to be rescued by the Austrian officers, whom Mrs. Armstrong, concerned about her husband’s safety and well-being, had induced to take her up the mountain herself to save him. Armstrong eventually finds the letter she wrote von Steuben, in which she said she loved only her husband and wasn’t going to run off with von Steuben after all. Armstrong naturally feels guilty about having stranded von Steuben on The Pinnacle – an ending prefigured by a plaque we’ve seen earlier which tells of a similar love triangle that happened there in 1869 – and he and his wife leave Cortina together and hopefully have learned from their experience.

Blind Husbands is reminiscent of the German mountaineering films in the almost religious awe it shows for the mountains themselves; in one of Ducey’s intertitles von Steuben says that to him mountains are just big rocks and the only joy he takes in them is in conquering them, and we’re supposed to see the ending as the mountain avenging itself for his irreverence. (One of Ducey’s titles tells us that in so many words.) It also features a religious ritual called the “Feast of the Transfiguration,” which Charles tells me occurs on August 8 – which sets the time of this film as midsummer. Like such other major directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, Stroheim was a Roman Catholic, and narratives of guilt and penance occur quite often in his films – as well as elaborate religious rituals like the stunning Corpus Christi procession (originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor and blessedly shown that way in the current prints) in The Wedding March. Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career started stunningly – Blind Husbands was an enormous hit (according to Valerie Germonprez, it cost just $42,000 to make and grossed over a million) – but soon petered out, partly due to Stroheim’s notorious passion for realism and partly due to the ridiculous myths that got spun around him. In his 1923 film The Merry-Go-Round – from which Stroheim was fired in mid-shoot and replaced by Rupert Julian, of whom one Universal executive told historian Carlos Clarens that he had all Stroheim’s affectations and none of his talent – there’s an early scene in which actor Norman Kerry gets out of bed wearing a monogrammed nightgown. Both the nightgown and the monogram are clearly visible on screen. But the Hollywood rumor mill got hold of it and started the myth that Stroheim had insisted that the hundreds of extras playing Austrian cavalrymen wear similarly monogrammed underwear, invisible on screen – and despite the denials from Stroheim and people who knew him, that absurd story is still being printed as if it were true.