Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
Leaving MGM (and Irving Thalberg) behind and joining Paramount, Erich von Stroheim worked with his co-writer Harry Carr to come up with a tale set in Stroheim's native Vienna, a tale as large and expansive as anything he had told. The production ran on for nine months after having essentially recreated a large section of… Continue reading The Wedding March
Based on an operetta by Franz Lehar, The Merry Widow is Erich von Stroheim working in a similar space as his contemporary Ernst Lubitsch (who made his own version of the same story nine years later). von Stroheim doesn't have the same light touch as Lubitsch, but he was a graceful, detailed, and ornate filmmaker… Continue reading The Merry Widow
"Can you tell me what the movie Greed is really about?" asked no one ever. I'm going to be honest, I hate the title Greed for this film. A film that could have been marketed as the story of the rise and fall of a man gets limited to just the most basic of thematic… Continue reading Greed
I do not hold it against the film, but Foolish Wives is almost the same story as Blind Husbands, just with fewer mountain peaks. There's a man dressed as a European officer who sets out to seduce the wife of an American in a small, European vacation spot that leads to the same lesson about… Continue reading Foolish Wives
Erich von Stroheim started his directing career with an adaptation of his own novel, The Pinnacle (a better title than Blind Husbands, I think), working with the original studio head of Universal, Carl Laemmle Sr. It was also the beginning of Stroheim's problems with producers since they cut him out of the editing bay at… Continue reading Blind Husbands
David Vining, Author 