情场现形记

Erich von Stroheim’s third feature, the most expensive film made at that time, cost more than $1 million, this restored 142-minute version makes most of the surviving film footage to present its entirety, still elisions are evident, especially relative to the downfall to the protagonist “Count” Sergius Karamzin (von Stroheim), an imposter of aristocrats with his two accessories-and-kissing-cousins, “Princess” Vera and Olga Petchnikoff (Busch and George), the final blow is omitted.

Renting a cliffside castle in Monte Carlo (a magnificent replica built in the Hollywood studio) and tucking in caviar for breakfast, Sergius and co. must earn extra lucre to maintain their opulent existence besides the usual business with the banknote counterfeiter Cesare Ventucci (Gravina), who, inexplicably, still lives in the sleazy environs with his dim-witted but nubile daughter Marietta (Polo). When a US envoy arrives to meet Albert I, Prince of Morocco, Sergius finds his next quarry in the person of Helen Hughes (DuPont), the 21-year-old wife of Andrew Hughes (Christians, in his last picture), the said envoy.

This reviewer hopes he is not the only one who finds Sergius’ chaining-smoking, monocle-sporting, continental noble mannerism appallingly off-putting, but as beauty is in the eyes of its beholder, Ms. Hughes, derisively denoted as an unsophisticated, incredulous, cocooned American wife, embraces Sergius’ guise wholesomely, much to the chagrin of her husband, and precariously puts her own reputation on the line during a stormy night when she goes out with Sergius alone, saved by the fortuitous appearance of a passing-by monk (De Brulier), yet the unmitigated grubbiness of Sergiusnever relents, he soon easily ropes naive maid Maruschka (a woebegone Fuller) into giving up her petty savings on a false promise of matrimony, and simultaneously sows the seed of his undoing, which catches up with him after successfully extracting money from Ms. Hughes out of her own volition.

It smells like a vanity project, but von Stroheim at least manages to transmute his production excesses into something of a spectacle, not least for its money shots of a turret engulfed by fire and the actors’ desperate derring-do of jumping onto a spring mattress. Although the attendant metallic store by András Hamary of this restored version may not cleave closely to the emotional ups-and-downs of the narrative, von Stroheim’s FOOLISH WIVES, for what it is worth in its pieced-together form, like the meta-novel Mr. Hughes reads, cunningly reflects a satirical sting out of its full-fledged enterprise of a cautionary tale.

referential entries: Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950, 9.0/10); F.W. Murnau’s FINANCES OF THE GRAND DUKE (1924, 6.3/10), SUNSET, A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927, 9.0/10).