In Part IV of George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air a bomb is dropped inadvertently in the old center of Lower Binfield, the town where the novel’s hero, George Bowling, grew up in the Edwardian era and to which he has returned to rediscover the past. One of the most refreshing aspects of the novel is how it doesn’t romanticize the inter-war years, called by some the Long Weekend. But the years before the First World War must’ve seemed especially rosy in 1939 to a survivor of that war. It wasn’t Orwell’s generation (he was just 15 when the war ended), but Orwell was well acquainted with their psychology.
What inspires Bowling to take his sentimental journey is the imminence of war in Britain. Was it inevitable or not?
I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.
Those words, “rubber truncheons” appear seven times in the novel. They appear in Orwell's journalism as well. To suggest that they were a peculiar fixation of Orwell’s is to pretend that their appearance wasn’t deliberate. George Bowling wanted to know if such things were coming to sleepy old England. So he tells us about the world of his childhood and goes back 25 years later to see if any of it is left. Just as he is getting used to the reality that the past – the world he knew before the last war – has completely vanished, a bomber on a training run drops a bomb on the town by mistake. (Orwell describes the aftermath with telling details, like a thin stream of marmalade oozing along the floor of a demolished house mixing with another stream of blood.)
I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it—at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
And what terrifies Bowling even more than war is the “after-war”:
The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
The after-war world that Bowling predicts never got as far as England. Orwell expanded on it in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, but it was one that was all too familiar in the occupied countries of Europe. The British government knew that war was coming, but the avoidance of war at all costs was their guiding principle. Before war was declared, Germany had already re-taken the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia with no one to oppose them. It was somewhat reasonable to assume that appeasement would go on until the Germans possessed all of Europe. Whatever you did, appease the Nazis or not, the coming catastrophe could not be averted.
When France was invaded in May 1940, its leaders decided, after just 6 weeks, to capitulate rather than put up a fight. The fall of France in June 1940 was eventually blamed by the Vichy government on the Third Republic and its failure to take Nazi Germany seriously, even after the invasion and rapid conquest of Poland, and to prepare France for when its turn would come.
But the Vichy government, anxious to place the blame for their cowardice elsewhere than squarely on themselves, also named certain films for having effectively demoralized France in the ominous months before the blitzkrieg arrived. This seems hard to comprehend even now, 80 years later. But two particular films, both masterpieces, were singled out for having grasped the terrible mood of the moment and for having indelibly expressed it. The two films were Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lêve and Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu. The films were banned and were both thought to be lost by the time of the liberation four extraordinarily long years later.
The vulnerability of France in 1939 was greater than anyone realized. It was best expressed in the last great effulgence of creativity on defiant display in its cinema. Jean Renoir, who had achieved popular success with the realistic melodrama, La bête humaine, in 1938, was given what grew into the biggest budget ever for a French film to make a film that was initially intended to be entertaining. When the film, La règle du jeu, was released on July 7, audience reaction varied from unfavorable to hostile. The producer demanded that Renoir cut the film, including all the scenes in which he himself appeared in the role of Octave. The cuts, eventually amounting to thirty minutes, simply made the film more confusing and audiences more hostile to it, until the French government banned it outright as detrimental to national morale.
Like Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, the climax of Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game takes place with an explosion – in the film’s case with a shotgun blast. Andre Jurieu is shot to death by Schumacher, a groundskeeper who mistakenly believes he is absconding with his wife. It is a completely unforeseeable end to the film, viewed by some as a satire on the French upper class on the eve of World War II. Renoir did everything he could to appease the public and cut and cut and cut his film, noting the things the audience didn’t like and removing them as much as possible. One of the things about the film that no one seemed to like was Renoir himself in the role of Octave. But why?
Octave, although old friends of Robert and of Christine’s family, and a close confidant of Andre, is a peripheral character is every way. He is a hanger-on, without a title or a profession or any apparent means of income. If he resembles any other character in the film it is Marceau, the tramp poacher. In fact, one of the most touching scenes in film takes place near the very end, after Andre has been killed. Having to some extent caused the “accident” (he’s the one who brings Andre to Robert’s country estate and Schumacher was convinced that he was shooting Octave), he knows that it’s time to go. Octave and Marceau are leaving together, in the dead of night, and as they walk away from the chateau there is the following exchange:
Octave: “Where are you headed?”
Marceau: “Back to the woods. I’ll try to pick up some odd jobs here and there. And you?”
Octave: “I’m going back to Paris. I’ll try to manage on my own.”
Marceau: “We may run into each other again some day.”
Octave: “I doubt it. But you never know. Anything’s possible. Good luck!”
Marceau: “Good luck!”
Renoir’s film turned out to be a kind of memorial to a moment in history so fragile and transitory that it could never have lasted. Even before his film was finished the moment had passed. This is what gives the film a strange, lustrous beauty – we are witnessing the end of a society. Renoir enlisted in the French army film department and remained in France into 1940. When the invasion took place, he wisely fled to Hollywood. The maker of the pacifist film La Grande Illusion, that had dared to suggest that Germans and Frenchmen were brothers and that war was a big illusion, Renoir's name was high on Hitler’s list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo
Meanwhile, under the blitz in England, George Orwell seemed to enjoy the straightened conditions. According to John Carey, “Friends believed that he actually the shortages and discomforts of the war. He welcomed clothes rationing, and longed for the time when moths would have devoured the last dinner-jacket even if it meant everyone wearing dyed battle-dress in the interim.”
Such, such are my thoughts in the middle of my first week of self-quarantine here on my island among the tinkling palms. The virus has yet to penetrate this far. But the pandemic is still young.
For everything, it seems, there is a category, a classification, or a genre to which it must be assigned before any discussion of it can get off the ground. I recently blundered onto a blog devoted to film wherein the author described what are now known as "art-house films" and their relation to "other film genres". It's probably no accident that the contemporary film consumer should have come up with the idea of placing films that defy categorization - like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ozu's Late Spring, and our very own category-defying Citizen Kane - in a separate section of the Netflix catalog. There was simply nowhere else to put them. I posted a comment on the blog, asking, "Since when is art a 'genre'? Unless you have conceded, at last, that L'Avventura is art and The Searchers is a Western?"
Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.
For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.
Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.
And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.
So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”
According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)
In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."
Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:
"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."
But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.
But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.
"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."
Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:
"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."
Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:
"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”
The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.
Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."
"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."
But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.
All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:
"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."
Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.
(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.
When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.
But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.
The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.
Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.
No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.
His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."
In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.
Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see?
After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.
Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."
Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)
(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.
