Erich von Stroheim (1885 - 1957)
Queen Kelly (1929) - Erich von Stroheim [Amazon.com]
Biography
Erich Oswald Stroheim (September 22, 1885 - May 12, 1957) was an Austrian Jewish actor and film director, noted for his arrogant Teutonic character parts. He became known as "The Man You Love to Hate" because of the many villain roles he took. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_Stroheim [Mar 2005]Queen Kelly
Erich Von Stroheim's unfinished masterpiece has a scene where the title character, played by Gloria Swanson, is whipped out of a castle by an evil queen. --"Whipped Women in Cinema" list(Erich Von Stroheim, USA, 1928) (F)
Only decadent Von Stroheim could have
dreamed up a love affair to begin with a convent
girl (Gloria Swanson) dropping her panties as
she curtsies to the prince (who keeps them as a
souvenir) -- a scene from yet another unfinished
Von Stroheim masterpiece. Enmeshed in
what he also hated, this director subverts his
class and, perhaps unwittingly, reveals the
connections between libertine and puritan. -- Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel
Orgy [...]
Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow and The Wedding March) --Early porn fileProfile
Erich von Stroheim, who had been Griffith’s assistant, provided a strong contrast to the work of his mentor. In his major films of the late teens and twenties—Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, The Merry Widow, The Wedding March, and Greed—he responded to Griffith’s pastoral landscapes, studio-set cities, and fanciful recreations of historical periods by creating two alternative worlds. The most predominant was a fantasy, late-nineteenth-century Middle Europe, a place of aristocratic decadence, the diabolical corner of the operetta kingdom—the dark capital of Ruritania, where noblemen drank blood and crippled girls were forced into marriage by pitiless fathers engaged in whorehouse orgies, and murdered bodies were deposited in sewers. Too grotesque for melodrama (though permitting just some sentimentality), smirking at the morbid moralism of Griffith and his followers, von Stroheim’s lurid universe created a corrective dialectic. Cruelty takes the place of virtue, squalid death the place of rescued honor, perversity wins out over innocent passion. --http://www.otal.umd.edu/~rkolker/AlteringEye/Chapter1.html [Sept 2004]Lars von Trier (1956 - )
Von Trier added the "von" to his name when his peers at film school nicknamed him "von Trier". He also reportedly added the "von" in homage to Erich von Stroheim. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier
Merry Widdow (1925) - Erich von Stroheim
Mirko is hosting a party that becomes a drunken "orgy," and decides to bring the partygoers to Danilo's apartment to surprise him during his evening with Sally.a decadent orgy scene and semi-nude musicians in Erich von Stroheim's silent operetta The Merry Widow (1925) --http://www.filmsite.org/sexualfilms.html [Mar 2005]
Memorable sequence: the blindfolded, half-naked orchestra seranading a drunken orgy. --http://www.oakstreetcinema.org/films_0103/von_stroheim.html [Mar 2005]
The Wedding March (1927) - Erich von Stroheim
Originally made in two parts (the second of which Paramount tampered with) but with only the first having survived, this concerns the ill-starred romance between a Viennese prince (Stroheim) and a lowly commoner (Fay Wray). In many respects what remains is Stroheim's most poignantly romantic work, though even a lyrical tryst among apple blossoms is intercut with a brothel orgy, highlighting his abiding fascination with the social and moral extremes of the crumbling Hapsburg Empire.
US 1927/With ZaSu Pitts, George Fawcett, Maude George, Cesare Gravina. c109 mins. With Carl Davis score. --http://www.bfi.org.uk/showing/nft/featurearchive/stroheim/screenings.html [Mar 2005]
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