THE GREAT FLAMARION (1945)

One of director Anthony Mann's first films, this adaptation of a Vicki Baum short story is one of the last starring roles for Erich Von Stroheim. This is an early film noir and in it the 60 year old Stroheim plays the sort of role Edward G. Robinson was playing in films like Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window. As if to establish the ground rules of the rising genre, established heavies like Robinson and Stroheim (the erstwhile "Man You Love to Hate") are thrown like raw meat to the new monster in Hollywood, the femme fatale. In the case of Stroheim's acting career, Flamarion is like a noir do-over of his first talking role, The Great Gabbo, with the balance of power decisively shifted from the imperious showman to his flirtatious protege.

Mann and his writers immediately turn Stroheim against type by introducing him as a disheveled, dying man lurking about backstage as a Mexico City vaudeville show of 1936 breaks down amid sounds of gunfire. The wife and partner of a trick bicyclist has been killed, and the bicyclist is the prime suspect. But as the once-great Flamarion tells the last actor in the theater, after the cops have left, he is the killer -- and in proper noir flashback style, he proceeds to explain why.

The Great Flamarion, after and before.

The Great Flamarion was a trick-shot artist with a unique comedy-act gimmick. His act has him burst in upon an actress playing his wife, who he finds cheating on him. Provocatively for the time, he seems prepared to shoot his wife's clothes off before her paramour attempts his escape. The role of the paramour requires a dancer's agility, for he must dodge Flamarion's real bullets as the star shoots out the lights on a mirror behind the man. The paramour, Al Wallace (Dan Duryea in a very William H. Macy type role) is actually the husband of Flamarion's stage wife (Mary Beth Hughes), but theirs is an unhappy partnership. Al's an alky, but he has dirt on Connie that keeps her from breaking up the partnership. She also has the hots for the bicyclist she'll eventually marry. How to get free? Connie's plan is to work on the cold, teutonic Flamarion and soften him up. It'll take a while, but it'll get Al jealous enough to provoke a situation in which the eminently qualified Flamarion can eliminate Mr. Wallace. The beauty of the scheme is that she'll take advantage of Al's alcoholism to get Flamarion off the hook. He shoots Al deliberately, but a coroner's inquest determines on the basis of Al's drinking that the victim caused his own death by mistiming his steps on stage. Her deal with Flamarion is that, after a decent interval of mourning (three months), they'll hook up in Chicago and she'll marry him. Believe it...or not.

Mary Beth Hughes rarely got out of B-movies, but for Flamarion she deserves a spot in the Femme Fatale Hall of Fame.

In retrospect, it might have made more sense for Connie to set things up to make Flamarion's attack look more blatantly like murder. That way he'd be in jail, or dead, but as things develop, once he figures out (it takes a while, the sap) that he's been jilted and dumped, he sacrifices his career and wealth in order to track her down. He finally has to sell all but one of his guns to afford a ticket to the show in Mexico where he finds her at last. True to form, Connie seems poised to dump the bicyclist for an acrobat before Flamarion intervenes.

The Great Flamarion takes the flashback framing device to an absurd extreme, giving us a detailed narrative related by an old man on the brink of bleeding to death after falling from a catwalk. By backdating the climax to 1936, the writers seem to acknowledge that the vaudeville story was somewhat dated for Forties audiences. The film's femme fatale is a misogynist nightmare of wily femininity chewing up and spitting out successive male victims; even this early in the noir game cliche threatens to overtake social or psychological realism. But the movie is still worth watching for Mann's maturing visual style and Stroheim's iconoclastic performance. The actor starts off (in the flashback, that is) playing the predictable barking martinet, but as he responds to Hughes Stroheim reveals a reticent vulnerability that wins your sympathy. Unlike his archetypal jaded or decadent sophisticate, Flamarion is a once-bitten, twice-shy sort whose gruff manner is all about protecting himself from forming emotional attachments that might hurt him -- a wise approach, we might decide in retrospect. Stroheim loosens up quite a bit along the way, even dancing with himself at one point in anticipation of his reunion with Connie. It's an underrated performance that should serve as proof that the man history remembers as a director victimized by Hollywood has never really gotten enough credit as an actor.

Meanwhile, Mann was entering a phase where practically everything he shot helped define the visual look of noir. His effects range from the expressionistic (the bicyclists' shadows behind the curtain as Connie seduces yet another man) to the show-offish (characters often talk to people who are only seen in mirrors), and they give this film a style probably unequaled in any other 1945 release from Republic Pictures.

This is the earliest Mann film that I've seen and I can see the qualities in it that made him one of my favorite directors. It's a minor film in his filmography but one worth watching for fans of him or Stroheim.

FOOLISH WIVES (1922)

Erich Von Stroheim's career as a director was a two-front war. On one side he faced the American moralists who saw him as a degenerate foreigner out to corrupt the country's youth. On the other he faced studio executives who often sided with him in favor of mature content in film as long as it made money, which Stroheim's movies often did. The problem for the money men was that Stroheim spent too much and shot too much film. He seemed to think that a movie couldn't be too long. He thought his films could be shown in installments, and with that in mind television might have been his ideal medium. This film, like Greed, could be considered a miniseries fifty years ahead of its time. But since there was no market for a miniseries, Stroheim's films were edited into shambles of their former selves. The DVD of Foolish Wives is only about 2/3 the length of the first-run theatrical version, and even that 3.5 hour cut was regarded with horror by the director, who was shut out of the editing room, as the skeleton of his cinematic child. But it made money for Universal so the studio hired him again, on the condition that he not act in the next picture. That made it easier to fire him when he went over budget yet again. But even after that Irving Thalberg, the executive who sacked Stroheim, brought him to MGM for another tempestuous production, The Merry Widow -- which also made money.

Stroheim was a popular director, despite all the howls of protest against his movies by self-appointed tribunes of middle-American morals. He was marketable in his own right as both a director and an actor, making him a calculated risk that nearly every studio in turn took up until he'd finally burned all his bridges. He made himself a star during World War I by playing the definitive Hun, the evil Prussian enemy. Stroheim was actually Austrian and when he gained creative control over his own career he changed his persona from brute to decadent, though some observers seem hardly to have noticed the difference. But from the way moralists complained against his films you would think he was advocating depravity as fun for everyone. On the evidence of Foolish Wives that's just not so. He presents himself here as a completely contemptible villain who gets a most fitting comeuppance for his offenses; his corpse is dumped into a Monte Carlo sewer. Yet the film was condemned as if Stroheim had made himself the hero, and you could actually argue the point. A star, arguably, is the hero of any star vehicle, the center of attention, the person you came to see, no matter how wickedly he acts. In this case, Stroheim was "The Man You Love to Hate," and that famous slogan probably gets us quickest to the heart of the problem. People wanted to see Stroheim do his evil thing, the same way they flocked to see Lon Chaney play his grotesque roles. In both cases, the actor's charisma transcends the repellent characters he plays. Stroheim playing evil was like Chaplin playing the tramp; you knew what you were in for and you went for that reason. So the outraged moralist might well conclude that if Americans threw their money at Stroheim repeatedly to watch his decadent act, he must have corrupted them somehow.

What were they seeing this time? In Foolish Wives Stroheim is Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin, formerly of the Russian imperial army and dispossessed of his estates by the Bolshevik Revolution -- or so he claims. It's never proven that he's not what he claims, but he's consorting with two "aristocrats" who are proven at the end to be criminal impostors. They're in Monaco living on borrowed and counterfeit money, looking for a big score either at the gambling tables or at some gullible person's expense. Their target is the wife (played by the unstellar-sounding "Miss Dupont") of the new American diplomatic representative, whom Karamzin is to seduce into a compromising position. The seduction never quite comes off but the wife is put into a compromising position. Unfortunately for Karamzin, he's in his own compromising position, having promised to marry his maid. He's quite the tom cat, even having the hots for the "half-wit" daughter of his counterfeiting colleague. When the maid, after getting suckered into giving him all her savings, overhears Karamzin pitching woo at the American, she snaps and burns the impostors' house down. Karamzin makes an ungentlemanly escape ahead of the diplomat's wife, only to be thrashed by the diplomat. He attempts to takes out his frustration on the half-wit girl, and from there it's on to the sewer.

What made Stroheim's loathsome characters palatable, even entertaining to 1920s American audiences may have been a certain clownishness that really comes through in Foolish Wives. For someone supposed to be the personification of the depraved Old World, Karamzin comes off, or came off to me, as an overgrown child, a spoiled brat. We're introduced to him by the ocean as he takes early morning target practice, telegraphed to us in pantomime when one of his co-conspirators turns her hand into a mock gun and pulls the trigger. Called to breakfast from his play, he hogs all the deviled eggs as the women look on with almost motherly knowingness. His military uniform can be seen as a big kid's playsuit as well as a fetishistic or simply iconic detail of Stroheim's stardom. Karamzin's comeuppance is no more final for Stroheim the star than a spanking would be; he dies the way a slapstick comedian might die before going to work on his next short subject.

Stroheim sneaks a peek at a married woman in this nicely-composed shot. Below, he seems to be waiting for us to go away before he goes to work on his victim.

I don't mean to dismiss Stroheim completely as a menace. In fact, there's a scene in a gypsy's hut in which Karamzin is on the verge of raping the diplomat's wife in her sleep, only to be interrupted by a friar seeking shelter in the middle of a thunderstorm. As it all played out, the thought hit me that Stroheim would have made a great Dracula. He had the same evil charisma that Bela Lugosi often displayed, and was two years Bela's junior. And wouldn't you know? On the audio commentary a few minutes later Stroheim's persona was equated with Dracula as an archetypal foreign corrupter. Yeah...I can definitely see Stroheim as Dracula -- though he'd probably insist on the vampire wearing a uniform.

Butchery it may be, but what we have of Foolish Wives is quite good. Kino's DVD features the restoration by Arthur Lennig, who is the local cineaste in my territory. I never took any of his classes at SUNY Albany but I did quite religiously attend the old film showings he hosted at the Troy Public Library back in the 1980s. It's too bad that he didn't do the commentary track, since he's a great talker about cinema and even did a brief stint as a movie host on a local indy channel way back when. But I digress. Wives proves Stroheim to be a paradoxical director. Visually he was one of the most advanced filmmakers of his time. He wasn't big on camera movement but he was all over the place with angles and encouraged his cinematographers to innovate with lighting effects.

Stroheim built massive sets on the D.W. Griffith model for Foolish Wives (above) while looking forward to the film noir era in his lighting effects (below).

Stroheim had a great eye but his narrative sensibility was novelistic rather than theatrical. He created stories by accumulating detail gradually and subtly, leaving it for desperate editors to find the decisive scenes that make a photoplay. We're supposed to have lost lots of enriching nuances in all of his films because Stroheim made movies the hard way and never learned to do otherwise. It's too bad, but the man was playing with other people's money. He was the sort of artist who needed a Medici for a patron but got Thalberg instead. The irony of that, for someone who's just read a Thalberg biography, was the way the producer himself succumbed to the stroheimliche temptations of gigantism and "prestige" in some of his own pet projects, but that may be a tale for another time.

Stroheim's movies, as we see them now, are adaptations of Stroheim's movies the way other movies adapt other stories from other media. We ought to regret not having them in their true forms, but at the same time each film as is is still considered a classic of silent cinema. We should have them as he made them, but maybe there's no use crying over the spilt milk of movie history. Instead, maybe we should give Stroheim extra credit for producing raw material of such consistent high quality that even the most ruthless editing couldn't screw them up.

Here's gregoryagogo's homage to a man who knew how to smoke a cigarette:

THE GREAT GABBO (1929)

The Library of Congress restoration of James Cruze's musical drama now available on a Kino DVD is like the typical ancient Greek sculpture you might see in a museum. It's missing some pieces as well as its color. It arrived at the Albany Public Library burdened with an awful reputation that actually made me eager to see the film.

Early talkies fascinate me. They are victims of rapid technological development, obsolete within just a few years of their first appearances, and in many cases lost to history. Because of limited sound-recording technology, the early talkies are derided for their primitive camerawork and clumsy narrative techniques. They often are pretty awkward, but that quality assures them of that accidental-documentary status that arouses my interest. Because they're compromised by limited technology, they can be relegated almost by default to the "cinema of attractions" outside the classical tradition of seamless narrative and the invisible directorial hand. At the same time, they're documents of the late 1920s, an early high point in American pop culture, and among their attractions are Art Deco production designs and the music of Tin Pan Alley. On top of all that, The Great Gabbo features the talking debut of Erich Von Stroheim.

By 1929 Stroheim was already a living legend twice over, first as "The Man You Love to Hate," the portrayer of evil Prussians during World War I, then as the archetypal tyrannically extravagant movie director. Hollywood itself had a love-hate relationship with him. The studios frequently fired him from movies in mid-production, but kept taking chances on him because, when everything came together, his pictures could be big hits. Here, however, he is only an actor, albeit the star of the film. He was directed by a man best known for the first epic Western film, The Covered Wagon. Stroheim regarded Cruze as a friend, and explained his approach to acting in another man's project by noting that, as he knew how to command as a director, he also knew how to obey.

Stroheim is Gabbo -- we never learn if this is a stage name or his real last name. He's an ambitious ventriloquist who shows off his talent by eating, drinking and smoking while Otto, his dummy, sings and jokes. He's also a struggling ventriloquist, performing in Paterson, New Jersey as the film opens. He has a tense relationship with his assistant, presumably also his girlfriend. He deals with his anxieties by playing the tyrant with her (and by indulging in superstitions), but Otto often expresses his conscience and his tender side. After Mary, the assistant, drops a prop on stage, his rages drive her to leave the act. She challenges him to explain why he's playing small towns if he's so great, and urges him to think more of others. As she leaves, Otto laments her departure, and Gabbo snaps, "Shut up! You know we can't call her back."

A theater couple have been listening in the adjoining dressing room. Wondering why Gabbo is angry so often, the woman speculates, "Must be something wrong with his stomach." "Stomach, nothing!" her husband scoffs, "Something wrong with his skull. He's got a screw loose, sure."

Time passes, and the same couple are at home, the husband reading Variety. He learns that Gabbo has become a success after all, performing in a Ziegfeld style revue in New York. Maybe Gabbo is better off as a one-man act. "I could do a single myself," hubby reflects, "But he was cuckoo." "I wish you'd get as cuckoo as he is," wife replies.

Go figure. Maybe Mary was holding Gabbo back, although it seemed like she was the only thing holding him together. Success though he is, Gabbo isn't above doing publicity stunts to promote the revue. He arrives at a nightclub in a limo, attended by chauffeur and footman, and takes Otto to dinner. He dines enthusiastically as Otto sings and mocks the waiters. And who should happen to be in the same club? It's Mary, who has also succeeded, though not alone. She has a male partner in a musical act that's part of the same revue Gabbo stars in. Frank comes across as a real jerk, instantly jealous of Mary's renewed attention to the newly suave Gabbo, who gets the house band to play, "I'm In Love With You," a tune from the show, while a spotlight shines on her. While Frank powders his nose or something, Mary visits Gabbo's table, where Otto tells her that "No one ever combs my hair like you," and Gabbo assures her, "Yes, Marie, we both miss you very much."

The remainder of the film is set during a performance of the revue. Elaborate musical numbers filmed from multiple camera angles are intercut with the plot, with Frank growing still more jealous as Gabbo sends flowers to Mary's dressing room. Gabbo prepares for his own act, very friendly toward Louis, his dresser until told that it's time to go onstage. It's as if his old anxiety hits him and he suddenly starts yelling at the dresser. finally firing him on the spot.

On stage, Gabbo is masterful. As "The Greatest Ventriloqil Exhibition of All Times," he's dressed like an old-school diplomat down to his medals and knee-breeches, as if to sell that he'd performed before the crowned heads of Europe. The act is actually a pretty standard one. Otto is your typical irreverent dummy who ribs Gabbo and subverts his pomposity. Unfortunately, Otto's voice (not Stroheim's) is too mild and childlike when it should be sharper or more raucous, and his rendition of his theme song, "I'm Laughing," is cloying. Overall, though, the act is amusing, as Otto taunts his master with zingers like, "If I keep quiet we both starve to death. Put that in your smoke and pipe it." When Gabbo stuffs his mouth with a handkerchief while Otto sings, the dummy comments, "Last year he used to swallow a tablecloth." But when Otto demands a hot dog from Gabbo's overloaded dinner plate, the star retorts, "Since I'm you, I'm eating enough for both of us."

The volume of musical numbers increases as the romantic plot approaches its resolution. This brings in some eye candy, as we see chorines changing costumes, briefly revealing their scanty undies, and some of the showgirls standing on pillars, seen only from a distance, seem to be nude. This was still tolerated, if not necessarily permitted, in 1929. There's also time for some Deco-psychedelia in the "New Step" number.


The drama comes onstage as Mary and Frank argue while performing the movie's most bizarre (surviving) number, "Caught In A Web of Love." It kicks in just past the 3:00 mark of this YouTube clip.


Seeing the tension, Gabbo thinks he has a chance, and wants it. But what Frank has been pressuring Mary to spell out to Gabbo, we finally learn, is that they're married. Gabbo's behavior from this point is actually quite understandable. Regardless of what the filmmakers intended, Mary comes off as an offensive tease here. The right thing to have done would have been to put Gabbo straight at the nightclub. But the writer apparently wanted to have a big shocking revelation at about this point.

I was expecting Gabbo to go into Tod Browning territory at this point, with the mad ventriloquist attempting to destroy the show and the stars, but mere destructiveness wouldn't let Stroheim go berserk as he does here. Let him show you how to laugh as only he can.


Given the movie's awful reputation, The Great Gabbo unsurprisingly ends up better than I expected. As a musical it's definitely nothing great, but even these pre-restoration clips should show that Cruze filmed them fairly creatively for the time. He shouldn't be punished forever for not being Busby Berkelely. On the DVD, the image is quite crisp and glossy and the sound quality is possibly as good as it ever was. But the main attraction is Von Stroheim, who proves that, as they said in those days, he "had a voice." It's more of a growling drawl than the stock Prussian accent people may have expected from him, and he's fluent enough in English to make himself sound both pompous and plebeian as he needs to be. He can also handle the emotional range from hopefully repentant to insane rage, though he succumbs occasionally to the early-talkie tendency to talk...more... slowly...than...he really... has to. People who know him only from Sunset Blvd. should check this out (you can see the whole thing for free online, albeit in pieces) to see what he could do at full power as an actor.

For me the whole movie was redolent of its era. Because of its supposed primtivism, it seems like a window into the actual 1920s. It's datedness is a virtue for anyone who watches the film out of historical interest, and its overall strangeness makes it worthy of interest for anyone looking for an unconventional viewing experience.