Stanley Kubrick was known for his perfectionism where he forced a ridiculous amount of takes to his actors and sought to make his sets as authentic as possible. By living in London, he was allowed to go on independently without studio interference. Before his time, another director had this reputation but was stuck in the Hollywood system. His name was Erich von Stroheim and his reputation in the 1920s was seen as dictatorial, ruthless, and reckless. Actors were made to go to extreme lengths for every shot he wanted, making them suffer in the heat and play up roles that enticed them to become violent, sexual beings to the cringes of the studios. After being discarded as a director, after his death, critics looked back upon his work and recognized his genius, being ahead of his time. After the definition of auteur was made, some have considered von Stroheim the first auteur in Hollywood.
Erich von Stroheim was born in 1885 in Vienna, Austria. At 24, he moved to the United States and was a traveling salesman when he made his way to Los Angeles. He quickly got hired, first as a stuntman, then as a small-time actor where, in 1915, he received his first credit in Old Heidelberg alongside stars Wallace Reid and Lillian Gish. When the U.S. entered the First World War, Stroheim was the go-to on the accuracy of German culture and as the German villain in various films. He was so convincing, fans would see von Stroheim would try to attack him for events that occurred on the screen; people actually thought he threw a live baby out of a window in The Heart of Humanity.
In 1919, the war was over and von Stroheim turned to write and directing movies, starting with Blind Husbands. In 1922, his third film, Foolish Wives, would carve out his infamous reputation. A budget of $250,000 was set, ballooned to three times that much when principal photography finished, and after post-production and advertising, the final cost was $1.2 million, the first Hollywood film to surpass that mark. To the horror of Universal Studios, Stroheim’s cut was 384 minutes, or 6 hours and 24 minutes. They took over the editing and made it under 2 hours; the current restored release is 2 hours and 22 minutes. More difficult was the fact the story featured sexual overtones and censors either made the cuts or banned the film outright. His next film, Merry-Go-Round, was overseen tightly by producer Irving Thalberg, who already fought von Stroheim over the previous film. But his overspent ideas forced Thalberg’s hand and he fired von Stroheim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bKa6v1PJIE
The next project he went to would be the one declared his magnum opus by critics and film historians: Greed. Based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, it tells the story of a married couple’s marriage dwindling into violence over $5000 won in a lotto. With producer Samuel Goldwyn backing him and giving him the artistic freedom he wanted, von Stroheim went to shoot his ten-hour masterpiece that he cut to six to please Goldwyn. With Goldwyn’s permission, the movie was shot on location in San Francisco and the film’s climax in Death Valley, one of the hottest places in the world. To von Stroheim, he saw it as a Greek tragedy and said that the movie was the only one from him that was fully realized.
During this time, however, Goldwyn’s studio became part of the newly-formed MGM in 1925 and Irving Thalberg was brought over from Universal. The movie was removed from von Stroheim’s control and cut to 2 hours and 20 minutes. Thalberg brought in June Mathis, a screenwriter-turned-executive, to work on the cutting. Later, a reconstructed version was made that can be seen today and is four hours long. A handful of people, including film critic Harry Carr of the Los Angeles Times, saw the original nine-hour film (85 hours of film was initially shot) and said it was the greatest film ever. But, like many other cut sequences, it fell to the floor, was collected, and destroyed. Those scenes that are missing still are considered the holy grail of cinema but they are lost to history. When the studio version of Greed was released, it was a critical and commercial failure, leading von Stroheim to disown the film publically. It was an event that left him very bitter about the Hollywood system for the rest of his life.
After two commercial films, von Stroheim would get another chance at making his own epic in Queen Kelly starring Gloria Swanson and produced by Joseph Kennedy, father of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy, future politicians as President, Attorney General, and Senator respectively. The budget, as usual, went over, shooting went very long, and Swanson felt uncomfortable when she realized one of the scenes shot as a dance hall was actually a fancy brothel. Kennedy was called and he fired von Stroheim. With another director, the film was savaged with an alternative ending and was only released in Europe because of the lack of censorship regarding sexual content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpO3jE-m2Tc
His last film, Walking Down Broadway, went uncredited as von Stroheim was fired and most of the footage was reshot with multiple directors. The rest of his career would be only acting, most famously in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and Sunset Boulevard from fellow Austrian writer/director Billy Wilder. He would reunite with Gloria Swanson, playing a famous ex-director who is now the butler for his ex-wife and former silent film star. In the film, the movie that is shown on the projector is Queen Kelly. The performance resulted in an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Moving back to France for the rest of his life, his silent career was revisited and widely praised by French critics and historians. He died in 1957, aged 71. While dying and working on his autobiography with another writer, von Stroheim said dying would be easier if Hollywood hadn’t ruined his career.
The characteristics of this legend are simple: big budgets, long films, and total rebellion from the studio system. He was one of the first iconoclasts in the industry, seeking authenticity at any cost to the wrath of the studio and wanting to make movies his way at any length. In directing and in his acting roles, he was the man people loved to hate because his on-set behavior reflected his performances with his grimacing expression and thin hair, providing this menacing figure. As the Hays Code came into effect to curb portrayals of “immorality,” it came into conflict with a vision that dared to be seen through innocent, Roaring 20s America. As a foreigner, von Stroheim had the mindset to be real with his stories rather than follow the factory line studios demanded because of money. But he didn’t see it that way. He was about naturalism and the process of human nature.
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