Foolish Wives

A con man posing as a Russian count named Sergius Karamzin (Erich von Stroheim) rents a villa in Monte Carlo along with his two "cousins," Princess Olga Petschnikoff (Maude George) and Princess Vera Petschnikoff (Mae Busch), to scam rich tourists. When wealthy American diplomat Andrew J. Hughes (Rudolph Christians) and his wife Helen (Miss Du Pont) arrive in Monaco, Karamzin sets out to seduce Helen and then blackmail her into paying him to not tell her husband. Flattered by the phony count's flirtations, Helen accompanies him on a picnic, and when a storm hits, they're forced to take refuge in a country hut. Karamzin tries to make love to Helen while she's sleeping, but he's interrupted by the arrival of a stranded monk.

After Helen wins a large sum of money at a casino, Karamzin sends her a note inviting her to his villa, which has been converted into a private gambling den. She goes and agrees to "loan" Karamzin 90,000 francs, but when he begins to seduce her, his jealous maid (Dale Fuller), to whom he has made false romantic promises, locks them in the room and sets it on fire, then commits suicide. Karamzin and Helen escape by jumping into a fireman's safety net, but Hughes discovers that the "count" and his "cousins" are fakes and he rescues Helen and beats Karamzin. Olga and Vera are arrested, but Karamzin flees and goes to the house of Ventucci (Cesare Gravina) a counterfeiter who has been working for him. When Karamzin tries to rape Ventucci's half-witted daughter (Malvine Polo), Ventucci kills him and dumps his body in a sewer.

FOOLISH WIVES, which was von Stroheim's third film as a director, took more than a year to shoot and was reportedly the first movie to cost more than a million dollars to make. The studio even used the film's huge budget as a selling point, but then chastised von Stroheim for being extravagant, and cut the film from its reported original length of 21 reels down to 11 at the order of Universal production head Irving Thalberg (Thalberg's scissors would continue to haunt von Stroheim when they both moved on to MGM and he ordered GREED to be butchered). The million dollars is certainly all there on the screen, most noticeably in the stunning sets (codesigned by von Stroheim), including the count's luxurious seaside villa and the massive Monte Carlo casino, which featured a block-long exterior and a cavernous interior (described in a title as "Hell's Paradise").

Yet von Stroheim does not allow the film's physical lavishness to obscure the fact that this is a lacerating psychological story of rape, murder, perversion, and insanity. Von Stroheim introduces the monocle-wearing, degenerate "count" in typically unrestrained fashion: dressed in a silk robe and taking target practice into the sea, then sitting down to a nice hearty breakfast of ox-blood and caviar and getting into his standard attire of full military dress, replete with jackboots and whip. The tone and style of the film, which might be best described as Lubitsch-meets-Bunuel, boasts some customarily bizarre von Stroheim touches: Princess Olga pinching the maid in a sexual manner; the count's lascivious habit of licking his lips; a casino doorman with no arms; the monk frustrating the count's attempted seduction of the sleeping Helen; the surreal touch of having Helen reading a book called "Foolish Wives" by Erich von Stroheim; and the depiction of Ventucci's half-witted daughter, who pathetically clutches a rag doll at all times. The count's attempted rape of the girl and the subsequent image of his body being dumped down a sewer are raw and still disturbing. No doubt, they must have been shocking in 1922, as evidenced by the original Variety review, which called the film "Frankly salacious." That, it may be, but it's also one of the few silent films that are as powerful and entertaining today as when it was first released. (Sexual situations, violence.) leave a comment