(The Merry Widow with no singing? A silent version of an o...)
The Merry Widow with no singing? A silent version of an operetta may seem an unlikely venture, but this vivacious hit proved that the right ingredients make for an irresistible romantic souffle?. Those ingredients include Erich von Stroheim's stylish direction (in his first film after Greed), ex-Ziegfeld bombshell Mae Murray in her best role, a star-making turn for John Gilbert and a mythical European kingdom straight out of fairyland. Murray plays showgirl Sally O'Hara, who's jilted by a prince (Gilbert). On the rebound, she marries a nasty old baron who conveniently keels over on their wedding night, leaving Sally not only merry, but rich enough to attract a bevy of suitors...including the prince, eager to rekindle their flame.
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(Queen Kelly – Digitally Remastered
A young Irish convent...)
Queen Kelly – Digitally Remastered
A young Irish convent girl is abducted and seduced by a prince before being sent to a brothel in East Africa.
Screen star Gloria Swanson (“Sunset Boulevard”) stars in filmmaker Erich Von Stroheim’s sweeping, silent melodrama as Kitty Kelly, a convent girl who is kidnapped and seduced by a German nobleman. When their love affair is discovered, Kitty is forced to take refuge in East Africa where she inherits her aunt’s brothel and is forced into a tumultuous marriage.
Swanson put a great deal of her own money into this passion project, but only knew half of the plot; when Von Stroheim revealed the rest of the rather scandalous story, the silent film star panicked and demanded control over the final release version which contained dialogue sequences and one musical interlude.
Erich von Stroheim was an Austrian-American director, actor and producer.
Background
Erich von Stroheim was born on September 22, 1885, in Vienna, Austria. He asserted that his full name was Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwald and that his father, Frederick von Nordenwald, was a major in the Imperial army.
His mother, Johanna Bondy, was the sister of Emil von Bondy, an Imperial counselor. Von Stroheim's claim to aristocratic status has been questioned. An alleged birth certificate stating that his parents were Jewish has been published in the British film magazine Sight and Sound, together with speculations about his family and social position.
Education
Von Stroheim was educated at a preparatory boarding school and at the Mariahilfe Military Academy, from which he was graduated as a second lieutenant in 1901.
Career
Although trained for an army career, Von Stroheim had a keen interest in the arts, had a gift for sketching, was a good amateur musician, and read widely. His own future writing was particularly influenced by the "Young Vienna" group of 1900. During the Bosnian campaign of 1908, von Stroheim served in the field and came under fire from Serbian irregulars. Upon returning to Vienna, he soon found himself crushed by debts. His family agreed to settle his obligations on condition that he leave Austria. He was given a one-way ticket to the United States, a small sum was deposited for him in a New York bank, and he sailed from Bremen in November 1909.
In New York City von Stroheim took menial employment and wrote for the German-language press. He also served for two years in the U. S. cavalry during this time but refused a commission in the Mexican army. As an agent for a hat firm he traveled to San Francisco in 1912. Von Stroheim then worked as a railroad section hand and as a handyman at a Lake Tahoe inn. A chance acquaintance at the resort read his play Brothers and promised to finance its production in Los Angeles.
He then obtained a job as an ostler, and arrived in Los Angeles in charge of a carload of horses for a riding stable. The play had a single, disastrous performance on a vaudeville program. Von Stroheim then began to haunt the casting agencies for film work. D. W. Griffith chose him from the "extra" pool to play a black Confederate soldier in The Birth of a Nation, which led to other bit parts and stunt-man assignments. John Emerson, a director on Griffith's staff, hired von Stroheim as his assistant.
Von Stroheim acted in the Griffith spectacles Intolerance (1917) and Hearts of the World (1918) and in Emerson's productions, and was typecast as the dastardly Prussian officer of war propaganda films. While playing this customary role at Universal Studios he met Carl Laemmle, president of the company. Von Stroheim recounted a scenario he had written, and Laemmle offered to buy it. But von Stroheim insisted that only he could direct it and play its leading role. He was so persuasive that Laemmle agreed.
The resulting film was Blind Husbands (1919), in which von Stroheim portrayed an Austrian lieutenant attempting to seduce the wife of an American doctor holidaying in the Tyrol. The great success of the film made von Stroheim a star and a directorial talent to be reckoned with. He followed it with the popular The Devil's Passkey (1920), which he wrote and directed, but in which he did not appear. It concerned an American couple, a playwright and his pretty wife, bewildered by the continental mores and temptations of Paris. Next came a glittering, luxurious spectacle, Foolish Wives (1922), advertised by Laemmle as "the first million dollar motion picture. " Von Stroheim played a czarist officer preying on wealthy, idle women.
A sensational success, it was banned in some cities in the United States. Von Stroheim next wrote and directed Merry-go-Round, a tale of prewar Vienna. Irving Thalberg, a young executive appointed production chief at Universal, became alarmed at the mounting costs of the filming and abruptly dismissed von Stroheim. Merry-Go-Round was completed in 1923 by Rupert Julian, who received sole directorial credit although he had followed von Stroheim's carefully planned shooting script.
The Goldwyn Studio then offered von Stroheim an enticing contract, promising him an absolutely free hand, a high salary, and his own choice of subjects. He prepared an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, giving it the title Greed.
Opposed to the star system, he cast its important roles with little-known players, such as ZaSu Pitts, Gibson Gowland, and Jean Hersholt. He trained his players in a school of acting. He could draw unsuspected qualities from typed stars for example, Mae Murray, John Gilbert, and Gloria Swanson. Von Stroheim was determined to make Greed a naturalistic epic after the manner of Emile Zola. To emphasize its realism the entire film was shot on locations in the mean streets of San Francisco, in Oakland parks, and in the Mojave Desert.
Meanwhile, the Goldwyn Company had merged with the Metro Company, and Louis B. Mayer with Thalberg as his aide had been placed in charge of production at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios. Von Stroheim's first version of Greed was in forty-two reels and ran for nine hours. He proposed that it be released in two or possibly three sections, but Mayer rejected this unconventional plan. Eventually the film was turned over to a hack studio cutter who slashed it down to ten reels.
In this unsatisfactory condition it was released in December 1924, with scant success. Since then it has been hailed as a masterpiece. For MGM von Stroheim directed his own adaptation of Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow (1925), with Mae Murray and John Gilbert. A film of wide appeal, it is reported to have earned more than $5 million. Resenting the supervision of Mayer and Thalberg and embittered by their destruction of Greed, von Stroheim broke his contract with MGM. Pat Powers, an independent producer, offered to finance his next film. The Wedding March, another drama of Vienna on the eve of World War I. Von Stroheim played the principal role.
He engaged a screen novice, Fay Wray, to play the abandoned heroine and ZaSu Pitts to portray the crippled bride. The production was of stunning opulence. The Wedding March was before the cameras for seven months (June 1926 - January 1927), after which Powers, anxious to profit from his investment immediately, halted the shooting. Only a few bridging scenes remained unrealized and the enormous footage was divided into two separate films: The Wedding March and Honeymoon.
The Wedding March opened in New York in October 1928, to mixed reviews. It was a commercial success both at home and abroad, but producers were wary about the expense of his productions. Von Stroheim forbade the release of Honeymoon in the United States, since he had had no hand in its editing, but it was shown later in Europe and South America. Early in 1928, when The Wedding March was being edited by others, Joseph P. Kennedy, the Boston financier who had become involved in films, engaged von Stroheim to write and direct a film for Gloria Swanson.
His script, entitled Queen Kelly, carried its heroine from a convent school in a German principality to a German colony in East Africa, where she had inherited a hotel at a jungle outpost. The Hays censorship office disapproved of certain episodes, which were eliminated from the shooting script, but during filming von Stroheim slyly restored them in slightly modified form. This procedure, and the fact that Queen Kelly was being shot as a silent film after the firm establishment of the "talkies, " caused Kennedy and Swanson to discontinue its production when it was three-fourths completed. Swanson later assembled its first half and released it abroad.
Von Stroheim directed only one other film, Walking Down Broadway (1933), for the Fox studios. Using a play by Dawn Powell, von Stroheim, with Leonard Spigelgass as his collaborator, gave a story of provincials seeking their fortunes in New York some characteristic revisions. The finished film, judged unmarketable by studio officials, was never released. A few scenes were incorporated into a reworking of its scenario known as Hello, Sister (1933).
Rejected as a director, von Stroheim returned to acting, appearing as a mad music-hall ventriloquist in James Cruze's Great Gabbo (1929); as a fanatically realistic movie director in The Lost Squadron (1931); as a treacherous German diplomat in India in Friends and Lovers (1931) with Laurence Olivier and Adolphe Menjou; and as a sadistic novelist in As You Desire Me with Greta Garbo in an adaptation of the Pirandello play (1931). He also took roles in minor films of the "poverty row" studios and at one point 1934 was reduced to being a wardrobe consultant at MGM.
In 1935, he went bankrupt and moved to the MGM story department. (A script he wrote at this time, "Between Two Women, " set in a city hospital, was filmed in 1937 after he had success in the French cinema. ) In Hollywood he was viewed as a defeated survivor of the irresponsible 1920's, when he had imposed his reckless, ruinous dictatorship on million-dollar productions. The Mayer-Thalberg system of production control by then had been adopted by all the major studios.
In 1936, von Stroheim was invited to Paris to play opposite Edwige Feuillere in a World War I espionage film, Marthe Richard. He scored a resounding success as the disabled German officer in Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1938). Renoir allowed him full liberty to rewrite and embroider the role of the aristocratic soldier.
After Grand Illusion, he starred in a series of popular French films and was scheduled to direct a film, but the plan was interrupted by the outbreak of war. He returned to Hollywood to play in I Was an Adventuress (1940), in So Ends Our Night (1940), and (as General Rommel) in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). In early 1941, he opened in Baltimore in the comedy Arsenic and Old Lace and toured until the end of 1942, when he replaced Boris Karloff in the Broadway production. In 1945, von Stroheim returned to France and made several films there, including a screen version of Strindberg's Dance of Death (1948). In 1949, at the request of Billy Wilder, he came back to Hollywood for his last appearance in an American film, Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which he played a director who has become the butler of a former movie queen, Gloria Swanson.
To celebrate this reunion of Miss Swanson and her quondam director, an excerpt from Queen Kelly was included in Sunset Boulevard. During the early 1950's von Stroheim acted in French films, among them Sacha Guitry's Napoleon, in which he portrayed Beethoven. He devoted much time to writing, still hoping he might have the opportunity to direct again. He prepared several scenarios in his customary exacting fashion.
His novel Paprika (1935) had had good sales in the United States and England, and was translated into French, Dutch, and Portuguese. He wrote a two-volume novel in French, Les Feux de la Saint-Jean (1951 - 1954), and followed it with Poto-Poto (1956), from an unrealized screenplay. He was preparing to write his memoirs when he died at Maurepas, Seine-et-Oise, France.
Quotations:
"In Hollywood - in Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture. "
"As soon as I had seen Fay Wray and spoken with her for a few minutes, I knew I had found the right girl. "
"It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance. "
"I could not work with a girl who did not have a spiritual quality. "
"I am just old-fashioned enough to prefer long hair. "
"I was reared in an atmosphere where a great deal of attention was paid to women's hairdressing. "
"Bobbed hair makes women look uniform. They lack individuality. "
"Since that first showing of Foolish Wives I have seemed to walk through vast crowds of people, their white American faces turned towards me in stern reproof. "
"I would like to have you quote me, Erich von Stroheim, as having said on this day of this month of this year this one thing: you Americans are living on baby food. "
"And yet because of my attempt at sincerity I have been condemned, hooted at, reviled; filthy rumors have been circulated about me, not about my characterizations but about me personally, my private self. "
"Fay has spirituality too, but she also has that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men. "
"If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead. "
Personality
In 1926, American critics voted von Stroheim the best director of the year. He also became an American citizen in that year. He learned the technique of film-making during his apprenticeship under Griffith; but while Griffith, with his sentimental Victorianism, was old-fashioned by the end of World War I, von Stroheim came forward as the new master of American cinematography in the early 1920's.
He introduced a bolder treatment of sex much of it influenced by continental writers Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Arthur Schnitzler. Von Stroheim considered himself a Zolaesque realist, though in his films realism as in Zola was often stylized into a sort of surrealism of Strindberg's nightmare visions, while the drab and dull were touched up with grotesque, humorous detail. His fabled extravagances, much exaggerated by publicity agents and journalists, his demand that all detail be convincing regardless of expense, lent depth to his films.
His often graphic reproduction of the sordid was imitated by other directors Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, and William Wyler and his treatment of sexual relationships influenced Luis Bunuel. His masterful direction has seldom been equaled. Sergei Eisenstein cited him as "The Director. " His indifference to money was an inborn trait, causing both his exile from Austria and his exile from direction in Hollywood.
Connections
In 1913, Von Stroheim married Margaret Knox, who helped him perfect his English and collaborated with him in writing stories and plays. They were divorced in 1914.
The new assignment took him to New York City, where von Stroheim married May Jones, a theatrical costume designer, in 1917; they had one son. Later that year they were divorced, and in 1919, he married Valerie Germonprez. They had one son.