Foolish Wives

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Now that I’ve got my drive back for ‘project 1001’, it’s time to make a valiant effort to keep it that way, hence this afternoon I hunkered down with what is critically considered as Erich von Stroheim’s masterwork.

Foolish Wives stars Stroheim himself as the charismatic scam artist Count Karamzin who, along with the help of his ‘cousins’ Princesses Olga and Vera Petchnikoff, works to seduce the neglected wife an American diplomat recently arrived in Monte Carlo, stealing a small fortune in the process.

The 1920’s were a very experimental time for cinema, not merely with the tricks and magics that could be achieved with the camera and special effects, but with visual narrative as well.

After Foolish Wives, Stroheim was celebrated as cinema’s first great ironist, as the film turns all conventional film narratives cleanly upside down and inside out. The antihero and his costars are by far the more entertaining and engaging characters, a stark comparison to the heroes/victims: the boring, bland Americans. Glamorising Monte Carlo, tenderly referred to in the film as ‘Hell’s Paradise’, Stroheim enraptures his audience with mesmerising scenes of raucous gaiety, gambling, and scheming, without a moral or cautionary message appearing until the final shot. As such, your emotional attachments, bar perhaps one, are with the ‘villains’ throughout. This cynical feeling towards the neglected heroine is even mirrored in the judgmental inflection of the film’s title, which –ironically- is also the name of the book she reads in-film!

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But the film is not all garish fun and cynical breaking of hearts. A darker underline follows the narrative, beautifully expressed through the multiple ‘love stories’ that Karamzin stars in. No woman is safe regardless of wealth, nationality, or even mental competency, and the film’s drama, which gloriously rears its head in the third act, is a wonderfully poignant and satisfying narrative turn. Without spoiling anything, the final twenty minutes of the film are the most compelling, poetic, and narratively satisfying minutes you’ll spend staring at a screen!

Foolish Wives was truly a step forward for narrative in cinema, it could even be argued to be the silver screen’s first black comedy (loosely), and it’s definitely a film I would recommend to fellow cinephiles!

Director: Erich von Stroheim, 1923

Cast: Erich von Stroheim, Rudolph Christians, Miss DuPont, Maude George, Mae Busch, Dale Fuller, Al Edmudsen, Cesare gravina, Malvina Polo, Louis K. Webb, Mrs. Kent, C. J. Allen, & Edward Reinach