The Merry Widow (MGM, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 12) Turner Classic Movies scheduled on their “Silent Sunday Showcase” one of my all-time favorite films, The Merry Widow (1925), directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Mae Murray in the title role and John Gilbert as her leading man. TCM host Jacqueline Stewart mentioned the frayed relationships between director and stars during the production, but in fact Stroheim and Gilbert got along famously. According to Stroheim biographer Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Stroheim and Gilbert bonded over their mutual detestation of MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer. On their first meeting, Stroheim told Gilbert that Mayer had instructed him to report on every time Gilbert misbehaved on set, but he didn’t want to have to do that because they both hated Mayer – so Stroheim and Gilbert got along fine. Alas, relations between Stroheim and his female star were anything but smooth. Mae Murray had been built up into a major dancing star – even though films were still silent – by her third husband (of four), director Robert Z. Leonard, after she’d already built a reputation on stage as a partner of dancing legend Vernon Castle (that’s something of a surprise since I hadn’t known Vernon Castle had danced with anyone other than his real-life wife Irene) and star of several stage revues. Murray was born May 10, 1889, which meant that by the time she made The Merry Widow she was already 35 and one can see in her close-ups how MGM’s makeup people (uncredited on imdb.com) plastered her face with the stuff to make sure she’d look like a properly virginal ingénue. At the time she made The Merry Widow Murray had just divorced Leonard and had fallen into the clutches of Prince David Mdivani, one of a trio of Polish gold-digging brothers who all married movie stars and bled them dry financially. (Murray married David Mdivani in 1926, divorced him in 1934 and wisely stayed single for the remaining 31 years of her life.)

The Merry Widow was also made at a breaking point in Stroheim’s career; he’d just made Greed, his epic adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague, under a contract he’d signed with Goldwyn Studios just before it merged with Metro to form MGM. (It’s indicative of Stroheim’s hatred of Mayer that the end credit for The Merry Widow lists it as “A Metro-Goldwyn Picture.”) The story of Greed is almost too well known: Stroheim’s original cut was nine hours long. Later he boiled it down to four hours, and his friend, director Rex Ingram (who’d given Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro their star-making roles and, like Stroheim, hated Louis B. Mayer so much his films went out as “Metro-Goldwyn” productions), created a three-hour version. But that wasn’t short enough for Mayer and his production chief, Irving Thalberg, who further cut it to 100 minutes and released it to almost no promotion, then gave themselves brownie points for being right when it flopped. Stroheim still owed MGM two films on his Goldwyn contract, and Thalberg suggested The Merry Widow as a story for him. The Merry Widow had begun life as Die lustige Witwe, a 1905 Viennese operetta composed by Franz Lehár to a libretto by Viktor Léon and Leo Stein based on an 1861 play by Henri Meilhac (best known as co-librettist for Bizet’s Carmen) called The Embassy Attaché. It was a huge hit in German in Vienna and an even bigger hit on Broadway, where it was brought in 1907 by producer Henry Savage and ran for over 400 performances.

According to Stroheim biographer Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Thalberg told Stroheim that his film of The Merry Widow “could be as free an adaptation as he saw fit, but it must include two scenes: the one in which the widow and the prince waltz at the Paris embassy, and the one at Maxim’s.” Thalberg assigned Stroheim a collaborator, Benjamin Glazer, to work on the script, and the two came up with a screenplay that expanded the backstory of the Léon-Stein book so extensively that the 2-hour-20-minute film is 90 minutes in before the original plot occurs. The Stroheim Merry Widow takes place in the fictional kingdom of Monteblanco (when my husband Charles and I first saw it together he joked, “Why does Monteblanco have such a big army? In case of an invasion from Montenegro?”), where King Nikita I (George Fawcett) and his wife, Queen Milena (Josephine Crowell), reign. Alas, Nikita’s son and heir, Crown Prince Mirko (Roy D’Arcy in a role Stroheim had wanted to play himself, but Thalberg wouldn’t let him because he wanted the option to fire Stroheim as director and he couldn’t do that easily if he were also a major actor in the film), is a vicious, nasty piece of work who in one scene goes out of his way to kick and beat up a defenseless crippled war veteran. (That was Stroheim and Glazer using the principle of Chekhov’s pistol, only instead of a prop it was a character; he reappears at the end to … well, that would be telling.) The capital of Monteblanco is visited by a troupe of Broadway-style players called “The Manhattan Follies” (its producer is “Flo Epstein,” obviously a reference to the real-life Flo Ziegfeld, whose name and presence would later grace at least three more MGM movies), which stars Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray).

In a marvelous scene that to my mind is the best thing in the movie, her performance in the Manhattan Follies is witnessed from the royal box by three people, all of whom train their opera glasses on various parts of her anatomy. Baron Sadoja (Tully Marshall), the richest man in Monteblanco, stares lasciviously at her feet (he’s a foot fetishist); Prince Mirko stares at her crotch (because he just wants to fuck her); and the hero, Mirko’s cousin Prince Danilo (John Gilbert), stares at her face because he’s really in love with her. After the show, the action shifts to a no-holds-barred café called “Francois” (without the cedilla on the “c”) where, as Marian Ainslee’s titles explain, there are private rooms with padded walls where aristocrats can go to drink, drug and debauch without anyone overhearing them. Danilo takes Sally there and tries to seduce her with champagne and caviar, but she resists despite his blandishments, including two blindfolded and barely clad female musicians in the bedchamber with them to provide mood music. I give Stroheim, Glazer and Ainslee a lot of credit for making her fiercely independent and determined to protect her virginity at all costs; somehow this doesn’t come off like the coyness expected from a silent-film heroine – and eventually her resistance prompts Danilo to propose to her legitimately. Unfortunately, as Queen Milena (Danilo’s aunt) explains to him, royals can’t just marry on their own whims or desires. Marriage in a royal family is a political act, and she tells her nephew that she, too, once had a commoner lover but had to give him up for reasons of state. Mirko also goes after Sally, but in the end she’s exiled from Monteblanco immediately. Baron Sadoja, shown as a cripple (Stroheim intended him to be suffering from tertiary syphilis as well as being a foot fetishist), offers to marry Sally himself, and even though he repulses her she agrees because that will mean she’ll be the richest woman in Monteblanco and the courtiers will have to accept her as an equal.

Fortunately for Sally, Baron Sadoja gets a heart attack and dies on their wedding night before he can actually have sex with her, and it’s at that point that the original Lehár/León/Stein operetta plot begins. After spending a year in mourning, Sally re-emerges as “The Merry Widow” and relocates to Paris, where she hangs out at Maxim’s and attracts suitors interested in her money, her body or both. Meanwhile, back in Monteblanco, King Nikita and Queen Milena get anxious about the possibility that Sally will marry a foreigner and the couple will take their money out of Monteblanco and in one stroke destroy the Monteblancan economy. (Charles said, “Haven’t they heard of currency controls?” Actually they hadn’t, because no country was doing them in 1925. The practice of limiting foreign exports of a nation’s currency was dreamed up by Hjalmar Schacht, finance minister of Nazi Germany, in the 1930’s. Schacht was the only member of the Nazi inner circle who survived World War II that was acquitted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.) The king and queen send both Mirko and Danilo to Paris to court Sally with the idea of getting Sadoja’s fortune safely back in Monteblancan hands.

They re-meet her at a big reception at Monteblanco’s embassy in Paris, where Sally dances the famous waltz with Danilo as her partner (John Gilbert didn’t have a reputation as a dancer, but he’s good). There’s another audacious point-of-view shot in which Mirko sees Sally but the only thing he notices is her jewels, which light up to neon brightness while the rest of her fades to black (I suspect either Mae Murray or her stand-in wore a black velvet jumpsuit the way Claude Rains later did in The Invisible Man for the scenes depicting his invisibility). Eventually Danilo and Mirko end up in a fistfight over Sally which leads to Mirko challenging Danilo to a duel. Sally pleads with Danilo to avoid the duel, which leads Danilo to conclude that Sally loves Mirko and doesn’t want him to die. The duel takes place – Stroheim took cast and crew to Griffith Park in the early dawn hours to get the atmosphere he wanted – only Danilo deliberately fires his pistol into the air while Mirko’s shot hits Danilo but only wounds him instead of being fatal. While Danilo is recovering, he and Mirko receive word that King Nikita back home in Monteblanco has died, and Mirko must return home and take the throne – only at the combined funeral and coronation ceremony, the crippled war veteran Mirko earlier beat up for kicks assassinates him, and the film ends happily with Danilo as the new king of Monteblanco and Sally as his queen.

According to TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, Stroheim hated that ending – he wanted to end the film with the duel – and at one showing he ordered the theatre house lights turned on at the point where he’d wanted the film to finish before allowing them to be darkened again so the audience could see the ending he’d shot under protest on studio orders. Various sources have detailed the nasty arguments between Murray and Stroheim, which led to Stroheim nearly being fired from the film after the first day of shooting the big waltz. Murray called Stroheim “you dirty Hun” and, according to film historian Gary Carey, Stroheim questioned Murray’s credentials as an actress and said to her in French, “Actrice? Non, vous faîtes le tapin,” which Carey politely translated as “Your true profession is streetwalking.” (Google Translate even more politely renders it as, “No, you’re just playing the role.”) Word reached Louis B. Mayer when he was meeting with some exhibitors, and Mayer told them, “You are about to witness an historic occasion. I am going to fire von Stroheim here and now.” The next day he sent a hack director named Monta Bell to the set – only to find that the extras, who couldn’t conveniently be replaced because they’d already appeared in the half-finished waltz scene, refused to continue unless Stroheim was rehired. Stroheim and Murray more or less amicably settled their differences – the Los Angeles Record put out a front-page story with a banner headline reading “MAE-VON SIGN PEACE: STROHEIM WINS IN SETTLEMENT,” as if they were two countries having negotiated an end to war – and filming continued, though Stroheim left MGM after shooting stopped and had nothing to do with editing the film.

For the remaining 32 years of his life Stroheim told friends the anecdote of how Irving Thalberg had asked him why Baron Sadoja kept staring frenziedly at Sally’s and other women characters’ feet. “He has a foot fetish,” Stroheim explained, “Well, you have a footage fetish,” Thalberg snapped back – and Stroheim rather self-destructively ridiculed Thalberg, supposedly Hollywood’s most intellectual producer, for not having known what a foot fetish was. The Merry Widow is one of my favorite films – hell, all Stroheim’s extant movies are among my favorites – and I listed it in “10 More Unjustly Neglected Films by Major Directors” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html), an article I wrote in response to a “listicle” piece by Alan Howell called “10 Unjustly Forgotten Films by Major Directors” (http://whatculture.com/film/10-unjustly-forgotten-films-by-famous-directors.php). In that piece I compared Stroheim’s The Merry Widow to the sound remake Ernst Lubitsch did, also at MGM, in 1934 and wrote, “Asked what the difference was between his style and Ernst Lubitsch’s, Erich von Stroheim once said, ‘Lubitsch first shows you the king on his throne, then shows you the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom, so you will know exactly what he is like when you see him on his throne.’ The difference is apparent in this, the only story they both directed.”

While Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow – the fourth and last film co-starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald – is an estimable film in its own right, Stroheim’s is even better – and it was a major box-office hit while the Lubitsch remake was a flop. That didn’t stop MGM from making a third version of The Merry Widow in 1952 with Lana Turner and her then real-life boyfriend Fernando Lamas as stars and Curtis Bernhardt as director, and though it’s considered the weakest of the three artistically, it’s interesting that all three versions had directors who were from Germany (Lubitsch and Bernhardt) or Austria (Stroheim), the cultural milieu which had produced Lehár’s operetta.