by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was an underground copy of Erich von Stroheim’s vehicle The Wedding March, filmed in 1926 but not released until 1928 and the only one of Stroheim’s directorial efforts I hadn’t seen until now. Von Stroheim’s career has been surrounded by so much myth-making it’s difficult to unpack all the mythology and separate it from what he actually accomplished. He was an Austrian who joined the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900’s (while also taking acting lessons from Josef Kainz, who had retired to Vienna after running the court theatre in Munich during the reign of King Ludwig II and being one of the Gay Ludwig’s lovers) until he ran up such a large sum in gambling debts he was forced to flee the country. Stroheim ended up in the U.S. doing odd jobs until 1914, when he was hired by D. W. Griffith as a stunt person in The Birth of a Nation – and he even got a small part as one of the monstrous Black men (all played by whites in blackface) drooling over and threatening to rape innocent Southern white women in Griffith’s racist masterpiece. He started working his way up in the movie business – thanks largely to the sponsorship of writer Anita Loos and her husband, director John Emerson – and when the U.S. entered World War I Stroheim’s career got a sudden boost.
Somebody had to play the villainous Germans in all the patriotic movies Hollywood was making to support and propagandize for the war effort, and Stroheim – with his close-cropped hair, fetishistic uniforms and overall military bearing – fit the bill so perfectly that Universal, who had him under contract (though they loaned him out a lot), started billing him as “The Man You Love to Hate.” When World War I ended Stroheim realized that the market for dastardly Huns was going to dry up, so he decided to salvage his career by writing an original story called The Pinnacle which he offered to Universal president Carl Laemmle on condition that he both star in it and direct. The story cast Stroheim as a Continental seducer who goes after a young American married couple honeymooning in the Swiss Alps and who in the final scene takes the male half of this couple on a mountaineering expedition, intending to kill him, but in the end it’s Stroheim’s character who takes a tumble off the pinnacle and the couple reunite, sadder but considerably wiser. The film also features Stroheim presenting the wife with a sprig of edelweiss on his way to seducing her – a quite different use of edelweiss from its other most famous film appearance in The Sound of Music!
At the insistence of Universal’s distributors, Laemmle changed the film’s title to Blind Husbands but otherwise released it in Stroheim’s cut – the only time in his directorial career that happened – and after making a now-lost film called The Devil’s Passkey Stroheim cast himself as a no-good Russian crook and seducer in a film set in Monte Carlo called Foolish Wives. That was advertised by Universal as “The First Million-Dollar Picture” (which it wasn’t; D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which Stroheim had been in, had cost $2 million) and as the budget skyrocketed Universal started posting notices in neon with the film’s cost and the “S” in Stroheim’s name replaced with a dollar sign. Laemmle pulled the plug on Foolish Wives before it was quite finished and Stroheim pieced it together as best he could from what he’d shot. The film was a huge hit and Stroheim planned another movie called The Merry-Go-Round set in Vienna immediately before the war, with a huge set representing Vienna’s famous amusement park, the Prater. Alas, Universal had hired a young man named Irving Thalberg as production manager, and Thalberg first banned Stroheim from being in The Merry-Go-Round and then fired him as director.
Stroheim ended up at the Goldwyn studio, where he got the green light for Greed, a close adaptation of Frank Norris’s grim working-class novel McTeague which in its first cut ran nine hours. Contrary to the mythology surrounding this film, Stroheim was willing to cut it – he spent a year boiling it down to four hours (without pay, since his contract didn’t cover post-production) and his friend Rex Ingram, the director who’d discovered Rudolph Valentino and given him his big break in the 1919 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, took it down still further to three hours. Alas, while all this was going on the Goldwyn company was absorbed into what became MGM and Irving Thalberg was hired as production manager – and he ordered Greed to be cut further to just 100 minutes. Though hailed today (even in its shrunken form) as a masterpiece and featuring acid-etched performances by Gibson Gowland as McTeague, ZaSu Pitts as his wife Trina and Jean Hersholt as the villain, Greed flopped on its initial release. Thalberg assigned Stroheim to do a film of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow with stars Mae Murray and John Gilbert, and it was a commercial hit but Stroheim hated working at MGM so much he asked for a release from his contract, and got it.
The Wedding March came about when an independent producer named Pat Powers – one of the biggest slimeballs in a business that’s had more of its share of them (among the people he tried to screw over in his career were Carl Laemmle and Walt Disney) – put Stroheim under contract for two films and arranged with Paramount to finance and distribute them. This is a common operation today – indeed, it’s how most major films have got made since the demise of the studio system in the 1950’s – but it was unusual in 1926. Stroheim proposed an elaborate story based at least in part on his own experiences in pre-war Vienna, in which he would break his “Man You Love to Hate” typecasting and portray a romantic lead. He planned it as a two-part film, The Wedding March and The Honeymoon, and his story dealt with Prince Nicholas “Nicky” von Wildeliebe-Rauffenberg (Stroheim), who as the film opens is desperately in debt from his gambling and womanizing and is pleading with his parents (Stroheim regulars George Fawcett and Maude George) to bail him out. They refuse and instead tell him to find a woman from a non-noble but well-to-do family and marry her for her money.
Nicky is on guard duty at the Corpus Christi procession (at least part of which is filmed in two-strip Technicolor – the only time Stroheim directed in color and I think the only time he appeared in color, too) when he spots a young woman named Mitzi (Fay Wray, who regarded this as the greatest film she was in; in later years she would talk about working with Stroheim and “A”-list actors like Gary Cooper, and all the people who interviewed her wanted to ask her about was King Kong), who thanks to an accident at the parade is taken to a hospital. Nicky gets Mitzi’s address and continues to see her after she recovers, including taking her to an outdoor night spot where the two are covered with apple blossoms, lit by cinematographer Hal Mohr (who liked the movie so much that when he married actress Evelyn Venable, he insisted the ceremony take place in front of the outdoor set of St. Stephen’s Cathedral used for this film) in a way that they almost literally sparkle and glow on screen. A reporter who came on the set to interview Stroheim while this scene was being prepared got a quote from him to the effect that the failure of Greed had convinced him moviegoers didn’t want sordid stories about real life, so “I am going to drown them in apple blossoms.”
But the course of true love between Nicky and Mitzi runs aground on the family’s financial problems, and in a scene set in a whorehouse Nicky’s father and corn-plaster tycoon Fortunat Schweisser (George Nichols) make a deal for Nicky to marry Schweisser’s daughter Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts, who had been “typed” as a comedienne but whom Stroheim regarded as the finest tragic and dramatic actress in Hollywood; though her part in what’s left of The Wedding March is too small to make much of an impression, her role in Greed is one of the greatest performances ever given on screen and it should have broken Pitts out of comedies and earned her a serious reputation the way Sybil and Norma Rae did for Sally Field a half-century later). Meanwhile Mitzi has a suitor of her own to contend with, the butcher Schani (Matthew Betz), who out-and-out rapes her in one scene and then expects to marry her. Schani decides to get his revenge against NIcky by shooting him as he comes out of the church following his wedding to Cecelia – which takes place in a downpour representing the wrongness of the marriage (a metaphor Ernst Lubitsch would recycle in his film Monte Carlo in 1930) – and in a scene that seems contemporary
The version of The Wedding March we watched last night was bootlegged off Turner Classic Movies – not only did it feature the TCM logo but there was even a bit of Ben Mankiewicz’ commentary at the end – and it suffered from some weird flashes of static on the soundtrack but was otherwise watchable. The version was based on a 1954 restoration Stroheim himself supervised (three years before his death) at the Cinemathéque Française in Paris, but instead of the original musical score by J. S. Zamecnik (which included a theme for Nicky and Mitzi, “Paradise,” which became a popular song hit in its own right) the print we watched contained a score by Carl Davis slapped together from bits of Johann Strauss, Jr. and other composers associated with Imperial Vienna. (The Wedding March had originally gone out with a synchronized musical score on Vitaphone discs, and it wasn’t until the Paris restoration of 1954 that the original soundtrack was transferred to the standard sound-on-film system – and I’d have preferred to hear either those recordings or a modern remake of Zamecnik’s score.)
The Wedding March isn’t exactly the freshest plot line of all time – as Charles pointed out, it wasn’t
The Wedding March is a film that hits quite a few of my “Like” buttons: it’s Stroheim, it’s visually stunning, it’s morally honest (in some of Paramount’s attempts to patch together a releasable film from Stroheim’s footage – which lasted so long the film, shot in 1926, wasn’t released until 1928, and in the meantime two of the leading actors had died – his scenes of drinking and whoring were left on the cutting-room floor, much to his disgust) and it even has a well-preserved and utterly gorgeous two-strip Technicolor sequence. (I love two-strip Technicolor; despite its limitations – notably its inability to photograph blue – it has a beautiful, well-rounded, painterly quality that often comes off as more pleasing than the shrieking, over-bright hues of the three-strip process that replaced it in the mid-1930’s.) No one else made movies like Erich von Stroheim; despite his legendary extravagance (exaggerated in the telling; one of the undying myths about Stroheim was his alleged insistence that his extras wear monogrammed underwear to add to their sense of realism even though the monograms would be invisible on screen; this got its start when Norman Kerry, the star of Stroheim’s aborted The Merry-Go-Round, was seen in a monogrammed nightgown getting out of bed, with both the nightgown and its monogram clearly visible), he generally delivered value for money, and his honest depiction of sex and the things it motivates people to do makes his movies seem modern even though some of them, like this one, also seem more or less stuck in silent-movie conventions.
The Wedding March is well worth seeing and a quite remarkable film, as well as a testament to what a wonderful art form the silent movie actually was and how a director with sufficient skill and ability to coax great performances from his actors could make you wonder why anyone ever thought the movies needed sound. Also, one thing Stroheim is often ridiculed for is the length of his films; over and over again in movie histories he’s been criticized for expecting people to sit through a movie lasting nine hours – but in today’s age in which normal-sized novels like The Handmaid’s Tale or Big Little Lies are routinely turned into multi-hour, multi-part cable-TV miniseries, which you can either watch in segments or “binge-watch” all the way through in one sitting, it seems like Stroheim was ahead of his time and technology has finally caught up with him. He’s probably up in heaven thinking, “Damn! Now is the time I should be alive!”
