The Ur-Pervert. - Review - book review

National Review, April 3, 2000 by Randy Roberts

Stroheim, by Arthur Lennig (Kentucky, 514 pp., $30)

IN his 1992 book Hollywood vs. Ameri ca, Michael Medved criticized the film industry's penchant for perversion, attacks on religion and the family, glorification of lowlifes and criminals, and the general attitude that "life stinks." But what Medved attacked was nothing new. His list of complaints would have been as valid in the 1920s as it was in the '80s and '90s; indeed the origins of the culture war preceded Dan Quayle and Tipper Gore by 60 or 70 years.

A seminal figure in this incipient conflict between America and Holly wood was Erich von Stroheim, a director who began making films in 1919 and was virtually washed up a decade later. Yet few directors were more important in shaping Hollywood's vision of life. Ironically, most people who remember Stroheim at all think of him first as an actor who represented an older, more courtly era. In Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, Stroheim played the pilot/commandant Rauffen stein, the German officer who insists that class bonds transcend national ties. Years later in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Stroheim played Max von Mayerling, the has-been Hollywood director reduced to being Gloria Swan son's butler, chauffeur, and cuckold. Sadly, for Stroheim, Max was less a role than a reflection. By the time he appeared in Sunset Boulevard, he was a relic of another age, discarded, largely forgotten, as much a shambles and an oddity as Norma Desmond's empty and echoing mansion.

One line in Sunset Boulevard summed up Stroheim's life. Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) tells the faded star, "You used to be big." She shoots back, "I am big-it's the pictures that got small." The pictures, yes, and Stroheim would have added, the producers and studios too. In the era before talkies, when famous faces and opulent sets were everything, Stroheim was big-almost as big as his ego. In a brief period sandwiched between minor careers as an actor, he directed numerous over- sized, overwrought films. They were like a fleet of Titanics-grand, state-of-the-art, and doomed, reminders of what might have been rather than what was.

Biographer Arthur Lennig approaches Stroheim as a film scholar and fan. The director/actor fascinated him as a youth, gave him pleasure as a graduate student, and occupied a central position in his professional career. Lennig taught Stro heim to university students, reconstructed his 1922 film Foolish Wives, and fol lowed his footsteps across Europe and the United States. Stroheim is Lennig's thank-you note to the director, a sympathetic look at Stroheim's career, and a loving tribute to silent films, detailing not only what finally appeared on the screen but also Stro heim's original in tent.

Lennig occasionally overstates the freshness of his biographical findings. The fact that Stroheim played fast and loose with the details of his life is hardly news. At some points he would claim he was a product of the Austrian aristocracy and military system: He was the son of a count and a baroness, he said, adding airily, "Titles mean nothing." At other times, he claimed that his father was variously a colonel in the Dragoons, a civil servant, a commanding officer, and so on. As for himself, the crop-haired, stiff-backed Stroheim was apt to explain modestly that he was military through-and-through, badly scarred, you know, behind enemy lines in the Bosnian campaign. But then he would allude to the great mystery-banishment from the army, some family disgrace, or something with a slightly seedy and romantic pulse.

The truth is infinitely more prosaic. Stroheim was born in Vienna in 1885, the son of a modestly successful Jewish hat salesman. A below- average student, he was an above-average daydreamer, and his head was often filled with fantasies of military glory. But his military "career" was brief and inglorious. After less than five months in the transport- and-supply division of the Austrian army, his superiors discharged him. Failure awaited him in civilian life, too: The family business went bankrupt, his father died, and Stroheim boarded a ship bound for America. There he was reborn as a Catholic with an aristocratic "von" added to his name, and more dreams than baggage.

It seems natural that Stroheim would be pulled toward the empire of dreams, a land where self-invention was standard procedure. For him, and many others, Hollywood was not so much a place and an industry as a state of mind, something to be molded to one's fancy. During World War I he had become an actor, the Prussian militarist Americans "love[d] to hate" in anti-Hun propaganda films. In one memorable scene from The Heart of Humanity, he threw a baby out of a window before turning on the child's mother. When the war ended, and the demand for his "type" disappeared, he convinced Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Studios, to allow him to direct. His first film, Blind Husbands, a critical and commercial success, launched Stroheim's directorial career.

It was a career that burned brightly and fast. Between 1919 and 1932 he directed nine films, most plagued by problems. Profligacy and perfectionism were his twin vices. He spent the studio's money with reckless abandon and seemed to think no detail or scene too insignificant to show on screen. The result was expensive films that were indecently long. Foolish Wives originally ran 32 (12-to-14-minute) reels, The Wedding March more than 30 reels, and Greed an insane 42 reels. Several generations before Michael Cimino shocked Holly wood and sank United Artists with his epic mismanagement and wild ex travagance in Heaven's Gate, Stro heim appealed to "art" to mask his wastefulness. His bosses responded by cutting his films-two were significantly butchered, two others more benignly shortened-then by employing other directors to finish his films, and finally by ending his career. In the end, studio executives simply asserted their power and fired the miscreant director.