The Merry Widow (1925)

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Movie
German title The Merry Widow
Original title The Merry Widow
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1925
length 117 minutes
Rod
Director Erich von Stroheim
script Erich von Stroheim , Benjamin Glazer
production Erich von Stroheim , Irving Thalberg
music David Mendoza , William Ax
camera Oliver T. Marsh , William H. Daniels
cut Frank E. Hull
occupation

The Merry Widow (The Merry Widow) from 1925 is the screen adaptation of the operetta The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar by Erich von Stroheim .

action

Prince Danilo of Monteblanco and his cousin Crown Prince Mirko stay in a hostel with their soldiers. The famous dancer Sally O'Hara and her entourage also lodge there. Danilo and Mirko begin to woo Sally. Sally flashes Mirko and turns to Danilo.

After Sally's performance in the capital, the old Baron Sadoja, the richest man in the country, also makes advances to Sally, but she doesn't take them seriously. Later Danilo leads them to an establishment where they get closer to each other in a private room , while Mirko and the soldiers have a wild orgy in the same bar . During the course of the evening, the jealous Mirko deliberately disturbs the tête-à-tête between Sally and Danilo.

Contrary to Danilo's originally purely sexual intentions, he falls in love with Sally and wants to marry her.

For reasons of class, the royal family and especially Danilo's cousin successfully sabotaged this project. Disappointed, Sally marries Baron Sadoja. However, he dies of heart failure on the wedding night.

Sally enjoys her inherited fortune in Paris and is now known as "The Merry Widow". Mirko and Danilo follow her, the first mainly to bring the Sadoja millions back into the country, the second because he still loves Sally. But Sally no longer trusts Danilo. Mirko drives his intrigues so far that Danilo knocks him down, which results in a duel. Danilo is shot down and seriously injured. Sally takes care of him and realizes that she still loves him.

In the meantime, the King of Monteblanco dies and heir to the throne Mirko is shot by a beggar whom he once abused. Danilo, who is now the new heir to the throne, marries Sally and they become the new royal couple.

Structural features of the narrative

Stroheim wrote a script that contained only the basic pattern of the operetta The Merry Widow and worked on the material so that the light comedy became a satire on human behavior and sexual obsessions. Stroheim divided the figure of Danilo into two characters: that of the easy-going and sociable Danilo and that of the devious, arrogant Crown Prince Mirko. Sonja, the poor farmer's daughter, became a well-known American dancer named Sally O'Hara.

Stroheim mainly visualizes the prehistory of the merry widow, which is only hinted at in Lehár's operetta. The starting point of Lehár's operetta is the ball in Paris, where Danilo and Sonja meet again. At this point Sonja is already known as the merry widow. Stroheim, on the other hand, focuses on getting to know Danilo and Sally (alias Sonja) for the first time, the love story that develops from it, the failure of the planned wedding, which explains the difficult relationship between the two and Danilo's reluctance. In a way, Stroheim justifies the behavior of the characters and the processes in Lehár's operetta.

At the time when Stroheim was making the film, the operetta as a form of music theater was already deviating greatly from its original frivolity. There was a shift in emphasis “increasingly away from the pornographic towards the sentimental and sentimental. With which the operetta is given a 'respectable' garb that gradually veils the authentic, unrespectable origins. "

Stroheim's film adaptation reflects this change in a dramaturgical setting. While eroticism , sex and rough jokes are still strongly represented in the first third of the film , these gradually give way to a less sexualized and more emotionalized drama, which culminates in a shooting duel and ends with a pathetic wedding. In the narrative technique, too, an entertaining, orgiastic numbering principle is replaced by a lengthy tension dramaturgy.

Image of man, representation of society and sexuality

A large presence of revealing and comic elements in acting practices - such as in the operetta scene of the 19th and early 20th centuries - can not only be explained as commercial audience bait, but also as an ideological counterpoint to the veristic-rhetorical that has dominated since the 19th century Theater practices: In forms of theater that refer to a tradition of the Comedy style, it is not the noble intellect and normative-authentic fine art that is celebrated, but an unmasking grotesque, embarrassingly exaggerated image of man, in which existentials such as sexuality , food and excretion body orifices, fragrances and perspiration can also be discussed and caricatured.

Such a denial and playful questioning of the moral order, which can be assigned to the theatrical comedy style, was sometimes described in the press as “tremendous frivolity” and is “an essential feature of the definition of what distinguishes operetta as a special variety of modern music theater from other forms, such as, for example the opera, in which eroticism is also an omnipresent subject, but has never been played out as freely and uninhibitedly as in the operetta and never exaggerated into the grotesquely funny. "

By changing the fact that the farmer girl of Lehár's operetta becomes a traveling dancer with a revue ensemble in the film adaptation, Stroheim sets a lens through which cultural and social phenomena from the milieu of popular music theater and disreputable entertainment venues of the 20s are very much part of the film adaptation can be addressed directly in a media-reflexive manner. From this point of view, the film adaptation can be read as an artistic discourse analysis of the operetta world at the turn of the century.

Stroheim thus outlines a cynical, instinctual image of man. Later Willy Haas praised in the magazine The literary world the "aimless, wandering, being loved and being lived Weltekel and Menschenekel" in Stroheim films that does not "comfortable enjoyment of art" will leave more, but the audience "with iron claws grabs". The audience is faced with a grandiose demon.

Sroheim himself states in his essay Films and Morals that in the early 20s a weakening of the Victorian ideas of love and marriage was noticeable. “I wrote and filmed The Merry Widow with a normal dose of sex. The public reacted less negatively to this film than to my previous ones. "

In the following, special aspects of the cinematic representation of the relationship between society and sexuality are presented.

Flirtation and violence

The flirtation between men and women is constantly portrayed as a seducer-seduced model. The man makes advances to the woman; she shrinks back; he tries again and becomes physically intrusive; she fights against; ultimately she allows it. In contrast to the girls in the hostel, Sally breaks out of this pattern in some cases and questions the passivity of her role to be fulfilled by reacting quickly or by knowing how to defend herself.
The physical assault of men is articulated in roughly holding on and in kissing or biting against the will, but also knows creative strategies such as the apparently accidental spillage of liquid into a woman's lap so that she has to undress. In the context of the orgy in the Francois brothel , more complex constellations arise. There, for example, a woman is tied up in a chair and tickled by a man, who in turn is tickled by a man himself.

Prohibited curiosity

In some scenes forms of arousal supported by the media are shown. For example, Prince Danilo is introduced in the first few minutes of the film when he is excitedly studying pornographic photographs with another soldier. At another point Danilo is having fun with a girl. This scene is observed by a voyeur through the keyhole . You can see the classic close-up of a keyhole in film history, revealing a forbidden view for both the voyeur and the audience.
The opera binoculars also reveal exciting details later - depending on your preference. For example, Baron Sadoja, who is fixated on feet, takes a closer look at the long legs of the object of pleasure , while Mirko is content with the waist or Danilo with the face. Stroheim "uses point-of-view shots with opera-glass masking in each case, emaphizing the level of voyeurism involved, as well as implicating the film audience in the process of observation."

Fetishes

The sexual predilection of foot fetishism is negotiated primarily through the figure of Baron Sadoja . In a conspicuous number of places you can see a close-up of his face with nervously peeking eyes, cut in the opposite direction with a point-of-view shot of shoed female legs making girlish, shy, sometimes supple, sometimes twitching movements. The secret object of Sadoja's desire remains at an unmatched distance until his death. He dies before he can touch Sally's legs on their wedding night.
It is also noticeable that in the film there are further close-ups and close-ups of both women's and men's feet and shoes, but these cannot be assigned to the baron's gaze. Stroheim stages the Baron's obsession in an exaggerated and ironic way, but not explicitly as a perversion , but simply as a specific sexual inclination without clearly formulating a judgmental attitude towards it.
In addition to the camera's preference for shoes, it often seems to be the material itself that gives rise to a particular attraction. Very often, the focus is on the soldiers' exaggerated glossy leather boots on the one hand, and on the other hand, transparent, white, veiled clothing materials, such as the dancers performing at their performance. Lorenz Engell writes that an important group of distinctive images in the film is the one in which the camera “pans away” haptically refined textures with relish.

Excitement and disgust

Using the figure Mirko in particular, a whole vocabulary of sensual odor perceptions is declined. Mirko not only sniffs Sally's hair with a lustful look, but also a wall or a champagne bottle. In stressful situations or when the smell of pigs disgusts him, for example, he rubs a perfumed handkerchief in front of his nose. Sexual stimuli are also expressed through the emphasized visualization of the sensation of disgust or arousal (or both) due to olfactory perception. Jean Mitry also considers the moment of metaphorical over-maturity on the threshold of carnal lust and physical horror worth mentioning: “Pleasure as a refuge from fear and the sardonic depiction of erotic vices that burst like boils on the reddened faces of the princes [...] . "
Programmatically, Danilo also joins the action with dirty talk : When he arrives in front of the hostel, he looks at the pigs in the dung and comments “Nice little pigs!”, Then looks at the farm girls and mischievously comments “Nice little women!”.

Men fantasies

Stroheim not only stages femininity in his films, but also masculinity as an erotic eye-catcher. “Such sequences, in which the director's temperament becomes orgiastic through the baroque, decadent and unrestrained portrayal of lust, should be studied carefully. It is enough for me to highlight the orchestra of white, masked, half-naked women in The Merry Widow among the most original and genuine Stroheim 'trouvailles' , and as a counterpart to this the negro orchestra with also half-dressed musicians in a similar sequence in The Wedding March . "
In addition to the classic erotic portrayal of women, there is also a large number of tight, oversexualized soldiers throughout the film. The attributes of Mirko and Danilo are all phallic signifiers that emphasize masculinity : stick, sword, excessively long cigarette and gigantic beard band. Even in the first scene you can see dozens of well-built, uniformed guys. Their jackets “are not white, they are radiant. And they are not adorned with one or two dresses, but always with six or eight. ”The sexy soldiers sometimes captivate with some close-up shots of their prominent boots with which they occasionally kick each other in the buttocks. It is astonishing that in Stroheim's operetta film, homoerotic elements are staged just as playfully and cheerfully as was usual on the operetta stage. Similar to the logic of the mix-up or cross-dressing comedy , this makes it possible without any problems to show Mirko's and Danilo's legs, for example, exchanging tender touches under the table, on the assumption that it is a woman's leg without opposing it to violate heteronormative taboos.
Homoerotic moments seem to be intoned, at the latest when the soldiers and officers start a charming pillow fight in the brothel and then splash each other wet with champagne bottles, without one of the women in the edge of the picture seeming to be relevant. This is also indicated by the fact that not only women in the brothel share the company of officers, but also a half-naked Greek youth with feather headdresses.

Film music

The music for the film was composed following Franz Lehár's themes by David Mendoza and his assistant at the time, William Axt , who had already worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and who together also set audiences such as The Great Parade and Ben Hur to music. Mendoza's perfectionist working technique, based on long research, has been favored for some time by the relocation of the Capitol Theater Musical Library to the New York MGM studios. The description of his methods and working methods shows that he sees himself as a secondary artist whose primary goal in creating film music was the musically illustrative affirmation of the images rather than contrapuntal autonomies.

In a new score, the Dutch composer Maud Nelissen attaches greater importance to music as an artistically dominant element. Lehár's themes are expanded and broken with popular dance rhythms from the twenties.

Production background and special circumstances

Irving Thalberg , who, in his capacity as producer and studio boss, had previously been confronted with Stroheim's unconventional and costly methods as a director and who had dismissed him in the middle of filming for Rummelplatz des Lebens in 1922 , nevertheless turned to him again for The Merry Widow , because he found this a suitable material for Stroheim.

Stroheim rejected the star system , but the MGM studio forced him to star Mae Murray, then a big star of the new studio, and John Gilbert. For the male lead, Stroheim had planned Norman Kerry . Murray insisted on Gilbert and threatened to terminate his contract.

Stroheim had intended himself to play the role of Crown Prince Mirko, but Thalberg prevented this plan and hired the previously unknown actor Roy d'Arcy. Foolish women , in whom Stroheim had acted both as director and actor, Thalberg had been an apprenticeship.

Mae Murray and von Stroheim didn't get along at all. Both delivered what one critic called "twelve weeks of eruptive temper tantrums".

The arguments during the shooting allegedly culminated in MGM President Louis B. Mayer , to whom Mae Murray had complained, knocked Stroheim down with a punch and threw him out of the studio because Stroheim Sally, the role Mae Murray was playing, laid out as a whore in the script and refused to change it. The director Monta Bell was commissioned to continue the shooting. The studio staff and most of the actors refused to continue working under these circumstances and therefore MGM was compelled to let Stroheim finish the film.

Irving Thalberg , who knew Stroheim from their days together at Universal, criticized the fact that the character of Baron Sadoja on the screen was very fixated on shoes and feet and that Stroheim had used a lot of film meters (English: footage) for this obsession. Stroheim said that the intensive presentation was necessary: He has a foot fetish . Thalberg replied succinctly: And you have a footage fetish.

Also, The Merry Widow was - as almost all other films Stroheim - cut. The extensive orgy scenes of the princes and officers with prostitutes of all shades have been almost completely removed. A considerable part of the seduction scenes between Danilo and Sally fell victim to the censorship. Only a few pictures have survived from Sadoja's wedding night with Sally. Stroheim's script ended after the duel between the princes and Danilo succumbed to his gunshot wounds in this version. The happy ending was allegedly forced upon Stroheim.

Stroheim's version of the popular operetta caused additional resentment in various countries. In what was then the Kingdom of Montenegro , which is called "Monte Blanco" in the film, the real Danilo of Montenegro protested against the film because he believed that he saw allusions to the royal family in various characters. This meant that the film was banned in Germany , Yugoslavia and Italy , whose princely houses were related to those of Montenegro.

Despite all the problems, the merry widow was very successful at the box office in the rest of the world and was considered one of the best films of 1925. For John Gilbert, the film was another success. In addition to The Big Parade from the same year, this cemented his image as a romantic screen hero considerably. The portrayal of Sally O'Hara by Mae Murray is considered to be her only one of artistic significance. The merry widow was Stroheim's greatest commercial success. But Stroheim did not benefit from the box office results: MGM achieved through some legal maneuvers that Stroheim was deducted its contractually guaranteed 25 percent share in the profit of the film for the alleged losses of his previous film Greed .

Stroheim himself expressed himself in later years mostly very negative about this film and said at a retrospective in the 1950s that the only reason why he shot this "filth" was because he had a family to support:

“When I saw Greed , a film that I really put all my soul into, was mutilated, I stopped making films that were supposed to be true art and made films the way they are now made. The success of The Merry Widow proved that audiences like it; but I am far from being proud of it. I was forced to give up realism entirely. And if you ask me why I made such a film anyway, I'm not ashamed to admit the real reason: I have a family to support. "

The merry widow was filmed several times. The best-known version next to that by Stroheim is probably that by Ernst Lubitsch from 1934. In this version, which was based more closely on Lehár's original, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald played the main roles.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Koszarski: From: The Life and Films of Erich Von Stroheim. New York 2001, ISBN 0-87910-954-8 , pp. 172-173.
  2. ↑ The Operas of Franz Lehàr - DIE LUSTIGE WIDWE ( Memento from May 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Kevin Clarke: The Pornography of the Operetta (4). Operetta Research Center, Amsterdam 2009, archive link ( Memento from March 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Gerda Baumbach: Actors: Historical Anthropology of Actors. Volume 1 Acting Styles , Leipzig 2012.
  5. ↑ Munich Latest News, entertainment paper 1865, quoted. according to Manuela Jahrmärker: "From decay of morality to eternal classical composer", in: Rainer Franke (Hrsg.): Offenbach und die Schauplätze seine Musiktheater , Thurnau 1999, p. 276.
  6. ↑ Kevin Clarke: The Pornography of the Operetta (1). Operetta Research Center, Amsterdam 2009, archive link ( Memento from February 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Willy Haas: Mr. Erich von Stroheim, director in Hollywood, California. In: The Literary World. No. 33, August 13, 1926.
  8. ↑ Erich von Stroheim: Movies and Morals. In: Decision. (New York), Vol. 1, No. 3, March 1941.
  9. ↑ Richard Koszarski: From: The Life & Films of Erich von Stroheim. New York 1983, p. 184.
  10. ↑ Lorenz Engell: series modern film. Volume 1: Images of Change. (Chapter "The Merry Widow"), Weimar 2003, p. 103.
  11. ^ Jean Mitry: Dictionnaire du Cinéma. Paris 1963, p. 269.
  12. ^ GC Castello: Premier Plan. No. 29 (Journal of the Société d'Etudes / Recherches / Documentation Cinématographique, title of the edition: Erich von Stroheim ) 1963, pp. 31–32.
  13. ↑ Lorenz Engell: series modern film. Volume 1: Images of Change. (Chapter "The Merry Widow"), Weimar 2003, p. 100.
  14. ↑ Lorenz Engell: series modern film. Volume 1: Images of Change. (Chapter "The Merry Widow"), Weimar 2003, p. 97.
  15. ↑ http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/6_mendo3.htm ( Memento from April 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ magazin.klassik.com
  17. ↑ theater-wien.at
  18. ↑ Richard Koszarski: From: The Life and Films of Erich Von Stroheim. New York 2001, ISBN 0-87910-954-8 , pp. 172-173.
  19. ↑ Bob Bergut: Interview with Stroheim in Eric von Stroheim: Le Terrain Vague , Paris 1960, p 64th

literature

  • Herman G. Weinberg: Stroheim: a pictorial record of his nine films. Dover Publications, NY, 1975, ISBN 0-486-22723-5 . (English)
  • Wolfgang Jacobsen, Helga Belach, Norbert Grob (eds.): Erich von Stroheim. Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-87024-263-9 .
  • Jon Barna: Erich von Stroheim. Vienna 1966.

Web links