Foolish women
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Foolish women (also Foolish Wives ) |
| Original title | Foolish Wives |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1922 |
| length | Theatrical version: 122 minutes, restored version: 142 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Erich von Stroheim |
| script | Erich von Stroheim |
| production | Irving Thalberg |
| camera |
Ben Reynolds , William Daniels |
| cut | Arthur Ripley |
| occupation | |
| |
Foolish Women is a 1922 American drama directed by Erich von Stroheim .
action
"Count" Sergius Karamzin lives in luxury together with two "cousins" in the villa "Amorosa" in Monte Carlo . They acquire the money for their lifestyle through imposture and by laundering counterfeit money in the in-house casino.
In addition to relationships with his “cousins”, Karamzin also has a relationship with his maid, whose savings he later collects. He also has an eye on the mentally handicapped daughter of the counterfeiter Ventucci.
Karamzin learns from the newspaper that the American ambassador is arriving in Monte Carlo with his young wife. He decides to approach the woman in order to be able to extort money from her later. He makes her acquaintance and soon tries to seduce her. During a storm he takes you to a remote dump and thinks you have reached your destination. Only the accidental appearance of a monk seeking protection from the storm prevents Karamzin from reaching his destination. The “cousins” meanwhile show the ambassador that his wife has spent the night with them. He does not yet become suspicious.
At another rendezvous in a tower room of the villa, Karamzin swindles a considerable amount of money from the ambassador's wife through a hair-raising story of lies. The jealous maid, who obeyed at the door, sets a fire and locks them both in the room. At the last minute they are rescued by the fire department. The coward Karamzin jumps in panic and later justifies this with the fact that he had to show the woman how he did it. The maid commits suicide.
The ambassador notices how they play along with him and his wife and knocks Karamzin down. Karamzin's “cousins” are exposed as wanted fraudsters and arrested.
Karamzin left the house before then. He gets on the forger's daughter and tries to rape her. The forger kills Karamzin and throws his body into the sewer.
The ambassador's wife lies in bed after the shock and reads a book called Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim - she had read the same book when Karamzin first approached her.
background
Stroheim's third film earned him the reputation of an enfant terrible among Hollywood directors . The monstrous, vicious plot surpassed much in frivolity that had previously been seen in the cinema.
Stroheim provided the story and the script, the subtitles were written by Marian Ainslee and Ted Kent .
Ever since that production, Stroheim was considered an uncontrollable wasteful in Hollywood. He had Monte Carlo reproduced in great detail . The expensive backdrops can only be seen for a few minutes in the film. Hundreds of extras populated the lavish scenery of the casino and city in true-to-the-original costumes. Trams and war veterans served as a contrast to the decadent events. The filming dragged on for months and Stroheim kept inventing new scenes that he shot dozens of times until he was satisfied.
When the actor Rudolf Christians died towards the end of the shooting, he was forced to shoot outstanding scenes with the actor Robert Edeson . Actually a meticulous worker, he mysteriously accepted Edeson, who looked like Christians but had gray instead of black hair like Christians.
Stroheim was still considered untouchable, as his first two relatively humble films - Blind Husbands and The Devil's Passkey - had been successful. So the studio boss Irving Thalberg had to sit by and watch as Stroheim spent large sums of money on his film. Since he also played the main role in addition to directing, he threatened to be no longer available as an actor if the direction was withdrawn from him.
Foolish Women is believed to be the first film to cost the production company Universal over a million US dollars, and they then advertised production costs by writing "$ troheim" on huge boards and updating the costs daily.
Stroheim supplied the studio with a film lasting several hours and could not bring himself to trim it to normal length. The studio had the film cut in several attempts. Stroheim did not agree with any of these abridged versions. The shortened film was then shown with success in the cinemas. Even after some censorship interventions , however, American purists were still storming the vicious story. For example, the film was banned in the US state of Ohio .
Today you can see a version made from different copies, which only as a “skeleton” of the film corresponds to a certain extent to Stroheim's intentions. As with all later Stroheim films, many scenes and entire subplots are missing; In some cases, gaps have to be bridged with explanatory subtitles.
The filming of Foolish Women is also the subject of the fictional television series The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992). As a result, intrigues in Hollywood , the young Jones is unsuccessfully commissioned by Carl Laemmle to reduce the high costs caused by Stroheim and ultimately to stop the shooting.
Reviews
- The film's monstrous plot is dominated by critical aggressiveness. In this film Stroheim formulates his rejection of the bourgeois world. "Graf" Karamzin is a challenge to society that considers itself normal and its world well-ordered. And it is no coincidence that Stroheim this time also precisely fixed the time in which his story takes place - with mutilated soldiers hobbling past the magnificent facades of the palaces. In addition, there is a second topic that Stroheim has repeatedly dealt with: the oppression of women by the selfishness and thoughtlessness of men. Here he shows three variations: the ambassador's frustrated wife, the betrayed maid, who the hero let himself be endured by, and the feeble fourteen-year-old, the most innocent victim. Reclams film guide, Stuttgart 1973
- In "Foolish Wives" the "other man" is a cosmopolitan adventurer with a Russian noble name who seduces the wife of the once again unsuspecting US ambassador in Monaco. Here the juxtaposition of American puritanism and European libertinage is taken to the macabre extreme: the seductive count "Wladislas Sergius Karamzin" appears as a decadent erotomaniac who is finally killed by the father of an idiot he raped and stuffed into a gutter. Ulrich Gregor , Enno Patalas : History of the film. Gütersloh 1973
Awards
In 2008 the film was entered into the National Film Registry .
Web links
- Foolish women in the Internet Movie Database (English)
literature
- Herman G. Weinberg: Stroheim: a pictorial record of his nine films , Dover Publications, NY, 1975, ISBN 0-4862-2723-5 (English)
- Arthur Lennig: Stroheim , The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2000, ISBN 0-8131-2138-8 (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Arthur Lennig: Stroheim , The University Press of Kentucky Lexington, 2000, p. 135 , ISBN 0-8131-2138-8 (English)
- ↑ https://archive.org/stream/variety65-1922-02#page/n172/mode/1up