 |
|||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Von Stroheim - A Hollywood story Telling the tale of a tempestuous genius Archived article from Oct 5, 2001 By Douglas Frank Erich Oswald Stroheim came to America in 1909 at the age of 24 and added a "von" to his name, elevating his Viennese Jewish parents from milli-ners to royalty. He invented stories about his cavalry exploits when, in fact, he had been declared unfit to hold even a corporal's position in a transport unit. His imagination and storytelling ability plus a penchant for fabricating meticulous details, even about a life he hadn't led, enabled him to create nine motion pictures (all but one silent) and attain a position in the pantheon of early Hollywood idols.
Richard Koszarski, an assistant professor of English, has revisited the life of von Stroheim in a revised and expanded edition of a book he wrote in 1983, now titled "Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim" (Limelight Editions). The earlier book, "The Man You Loved to Hate," was based on primary documents, cross-checked against eyewitness testimony and contemporary accounts in industry trade papers and other period sources, says the author. In the current book, a third of the material is completely new or significantly rewritten. The revised text also makes use of documents uncovered by the von Stroheim family only recently, he adds. Koszarski's fascination with this icon of Hollywood's silent era began during his undergraduate days and continued through his doctoral studies at New York University in the early 1970s. "What made von Stroheim valuable as an object of study is that at that time there was a real dilemma about understanding Hollywood and the potential of the film industry to produce art. Scholars were questioning whether art could be produced in the industrial context of Hollywood studios. An ideal model was von Stroheim, who fought the system for his entire career and whose struggles with MGM over 'Greed,' his adaptation of Frank Norris' 'McTeague,' were legendary." Koszarski notes that von Stroheim kept returning to the same themes, characters and dramatic situations, suggesting the work of a painter or novelist. "Only Chaplin thought to use the cinema in this manner. In this sense, he was like an independent filmmaker of today. In his day he was chided for 'repeating himself,' but looking back we can agree that he was 20 years ahead of everyone else in Hollywood," says the author, who spent much of his career developing the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. According to Koszarski, von Stroheim's directing career reached its apex with "The Merry Widow," released in 1925. In it, he mastered "the leap from Frank Norris to Franz Lehar" and "demonstrated a command of style beyond the range of any of his contemporaries." Von Stroheim, however, "never recalled the film with any affection and took every opportunity to demean the picture, its star, the production company and his own role in the proceedings." He later implied that the project had been forced on him, despite the fact that it was his own idea. The director's relations to Hollywood were always tempestuous, notes Koszarski. Even as he was making "The Merry Widow" in one corner of the MGM lot, in another corner the studio was recutting his film "Greed" and throwing the pieces away. In 1999, Koszarski worked with Turner Classic Movies on a four-hour reconstruction of the film using still photographs from the cut sequences. Every single film was a struggle and a compromise for the inflexible von Stroheim, and every film has a different explanation for what happened, Koszarski relates. Sometimes he ran into the censorship machinery, sometimes he went way over budget or had arguments with studio heads, including the powerful Louis B. Mayer of MGM. "Some of von Stroheim's films might only contain a third of what he wanted or were finished by somebody else, and in some cases they are damaged or lost. My dilemma was how do I write about this man when all his films are corrupted," says Koszarski, who often went back to the original script drafts and cutting continuity drafts, which show how a film was edited week by week, to reconstruct von Stroheim's original intent. "In my work, I tried to establish the truth about how his nine films were made, not just because he was an interesting man and I like the films, but because I might be able to understand how the system was operating and why people who came a little later, like Howard Hawks and John Ford, were able not to evade the system but turn it to their own ends." Von Stroheim was also a highly successful actor, known for his portrayal of the prototypical Hun, using a whole arsenal of "obnoxious Teutonic mannerisms." In his earliest films, he is already leering behind his monocle, primping, strutting and holding himself ramrod stiff. "Audiences were being taught to hate the character, but this soon transposed to hating the man," Koszarski observes. His acting roles included one of the most unnerving scenes in film history. In the "Heart of Humanity," von Stroheim, as the German soldier, is tearing off the uniform of a Red Cross nurse prior to raping her when he is maddened by the cries of an infant locked in the room with them. He walks over to the cradle, picks up the child and throws it out the second-floor window. It is a scene that few in any audience, in any era, can forget. Von Stroheim directed his last film in 1932, although he continued to act sporadically, both in Europe and the United States. Indeed, the high point of his acting career was a strangely autobiographical role in Billy Wilder's 1950 film "Sunset Boulevard," with Gloria Swanson, for which he received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor, the only Hollywood kudo von Stroheim ever received. Films directed by Erich von Stroheim> Silent Blind Husbands (Universal) 1919 The Devil's Pass Key (Universal) 1920 Foolish Wives (Universal) 1922 Merry-Go-Round (Universal) 1923 Greed (Goldwyn; released by Metro-Goldwyn) 1924 The Merry Widow (MGM) 1925 The Wedding March (Paramount) 1928 Queen Kelly (Gloria Productions/United Artists) 1928 Sound Walking Down Broadway (Fox) 1932
|
|
|
For questions or comments about this site, contact Greg Trevor Last Updated: May 30, 2006 © 2012 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. All rights reserved. 
|
