Foolish Wives (1922)

(YouTube Streaming, March 2020) Oof. I have a hard time making it through 1920s silent dramas, and Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives is as demanding as his later Greed in that regard. At a staggering two hours and twenty-some minutes, it’s slow-paced, melodramatic, single-minded and infuriating at times. It’s a long sit even with the best of intentions, and any competent editor would be able to bring this down to 90 minutes with very little loss. But film is an education, and Foolish Wives does far better the moment you stop viewing it and start reading about it. The film was notorious back in 1922 by being the first Hollywood movie (probably the first movie ever) to have a budget higher than one million then-dollars. Much of the cost (which ballooned from an initial 250K$ budget) was attributed to writer-director von Stroheim’s perfectionism and can readily be seen on-screen: the recreation of 1920s Monte Carlo on a Hollywood backlot is detailed and often fascinating, and the film does make generous use of ambitious exteriors. Stroheim himself may be the other big reason to see the film: as a writer, director and star, the film is his in ways that anticipate auteur theory—down to the curiously modern meta-textual touch of having a character read a novel titled Foolish Wives by von Stroheim himself! Finally, one shouldn’t dismiss the decadence of the result, which freely presents a morally terrible protagonist all-too-willing to seduce rich women to maintain his lifestyle: something that would become rarer as Hollywood was forced to sanitize itself in the 1930s. While Foolish Wives may not be enjoyable, there’s certainly a lot here to contemplate and study for film historians. I really wouldn’t dare suggest it as casual viewing, though.