Stroheim

Blind Husbands

Blind Husbands is a very good film, made by and starring Stroheim based on a novel he wrote. THe film opens with a title card noting that "alienation of affection" is a frequent cause for divorce, and when it occurs the blame is usually put on the wife and the other man, if there is one. But, it asks, what about the husband, who has stopped wooing the wife with his "wiles" in his complacency?

The husband and his wife are in town for him to climb a mountain. As a doctor, he's called away several times to help people, and Lt. Steuben (Stroheim) takes those opportunities to romance the wife. He seems to have done so successfully; she promises to run away with him. When Steuben and the doctor are at the top of the pinnacle, the husband finds a letter from his wife on Steuben, which Steuben knocks away. When the husband demands truth, Steuben admits that the wife is running away with him (which the husband already suspected) and he leaves Steuben on the peak to die.

Coming down the mountain, Dr. Armstrong finds the letter: his wife rescinded her promise to Steuben, explaining it was just to get out of an awkward situation, and she loves her husband. Armstron wants to rescue Steuben but falls off the mtn. Steuben has rescuers coming, but is frightened by the spirit of the mountain (a very expressionistic specter) and falls to his death; the film notes that the spirit is satisfied. The husband and wife are reunited.

Deleuze has argued that Stroheim is the director of entropic degeneration and Bunuel is the director of cyclical degeneration. This film does not bear that out. We see a young honeymooning couple, deeply in love, and they observe Armstrong's inattention and vow never to be that way. And Armstrong does seem to degenerate; after suspecting his wife, he reads a plaque (complete with a soul descending into hell) that explains that a lover was killed by a jealous husband on the mountain. Thus his marriage (once like the honeymooners) and his morals have degenerated, so he attempts to leave Steuben to his death. But the note brings him full circle. He no longer wishes Steuben to die, and is redeemed. And the final scene shows the two couples leaving side by side, with the mountain guide imploring armstrong to love his wife. They may not be as lovey-dovey as the honeymooners, but they do seem to be in love. In this film, degeneration seems to be cyclical, and things come full circle.

Foolish Wives
For this film, I was more interested in watching a movie and less interested in examining how it fit in with Deleuze's analysis, and perhaps for that reason enjoyed it much more. But it also seems to me a much more mature work; it legendarily cost more than $1 million, far above the budget Stroheim was given, and it was worth it. Stroheim plays Karamzin, a false count romancing a naive American woman, but he also romances everyone else. He and his fake cousins, also fake nobility, survive using counterfeit bills, and Karamzin lusts after the counterfeiters mentally challenged daughter. He also seduces his cousin's servant, convincing her to give him her entire life savings. Finally he does seduce the American, the wife of the Ambassador to Monaco, and is going to get 100000 francs of gambling winnings from her, but the jilted and cheated servant ruins the tryst by setting the house on fire. The pair survive, but Karamzin's credibility is ruined by the fact that he escaped the house first, and that his tryst was discovered.

The movie ends in a brutal way. We see several things happen: 1. the servant kills herself 2. Karamzin sneaks into the bedroom of the American, possibly awakening the manservant in the house 3. the "cousins" are arrested and exposed as frauds 4. the manservant drags something out of the house slowly, and opens a manhole to throw it away. it seems to be a body, and just as he's about to throw it away, the hood fall off and we see that it is Karamzin. the corpse is thrown in the manhole. 5. the husband points out to the wife that the end of the book she's reading (Foolish Wives by Stroheim)

One of the film's chief accomplishments is creating the "milieu" of Monte Carlo - a decadent and degenerate city - on the backlots of Hollywood. Keith Phipps (quote from Wikipdia) writes: "Foolish Wives re-creates Monte Carlo in a Hollywood back lot...Playing a fraudulent aristocrat, in a touch that echoed his own biography, Von Stroheim dupes the gullible, lusts after a retarded teenager, and attempts to undo an innocent American. It's like a Henry James novel as dreamt by a pornographer, and it illustrates what makes Von Stroheim such a problematic genius: Is it nascent post-modernism or egotism run amok that made him prominently feature a character reading a novel called Foolish Wives, credited to Erich Von Stroheim?" The Henry James analogy is very most telling; I might have put it: "It's like a Henry James novel imagined by a naturalist" or, in more Deleuzian terms, "It's like a Henry James novel in which the real milieu of Europe is corrupted by an originary world of impulses, represented here by a swamp."