The Merry Widow

For almost a century, there’s been debate over the best way to watch silent films. Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française insisted on no accompaniment at all in the '50s, but modern times have seen a trend of making musical events out of these screenings, from the London Philharmonic playing along to Napoléon (1927), to some local, knob-twiddling synth-lord bleeping along to something ill-suited to his "art". I caught Eric von Stroheim’s 1925 comedy The Merry Widow at the TCM Festival in Hollywood a few years ago, introduced by the incomparable Kevin Brownlow and a wealth of anecdotes, and accompanied by a splendid new score, a North American premiere no less, by Maud Nelissen, conducting the Von Stroheim Virtuosi, a small and largely competent ensemble of strings, woodwind, percussion, and a very useful accordion.

In the almost non-fictional kingdom of Monteblanco there are two cousin princes, malicious stiffneck Mirko and goodnatured Danilo. The latter falls hard for visiting American chorus girl Sally, but Mirko’s mischief and his own princely duty dissuade him from marriage. When Sally marries a wealthy capitalist who dies, she becomes an eligible match, and Danilo has to contend with Mirko as a now-serious rival, as well as the unresolved misunderstanding of his previous rupture with Sally.

Stroheim claimed the film was butchered by the studio, of course (“The man who cut my movie had nothing on his mind but a hat” – turns out Brownlow does a pretty neat Stroheim impression). He also claimed the ending was a spurious addition, despite his having written and shot it himself. The film’s very inception – a commercial project accepted on the grounds that he had to include two specific scenes (including the waltz), but could otherwise do what he liked – betrays the lack of personal investment. The legendary obsession with realism is present, naturally, as is the discretely specific mise-en-scène, but in service of what? A flippant tale of two princes, comically dissimilar, and the dancehall girl who inflames the passion of one and the malignancy of the other. Roy D’Arcy is hilarious as the cartoonishly villainous Mirko, all toothy rictus and monocle, but he’s pure caricature. All the better for him, as the leads are not even granted that dignity – the real prince Danilo of Montenegro sued MGM for defamation, with some justification, as Gilbert’s prince is little more than a carousing, good-natured simpleton (imagine the reaction to his screen counterpart’s first appearance, chuckling in all too worldly a fashion at pornographic photographs his chum got from his barber). Mae Murray fares little better, her character confined to the standard-issue '20s thatch of a hairstyle, bowtie lipstick, and petulance, and most of the scenes between the two descend into (hard-fought!) eye-goggling contests.

There’s plenty of amusing incident and splendidly bizarre touches: the final wedding takes place beneath a monstrously large crucifix; the capitalist is a drooling foot fetishist; and snippets of Stroheim’s outlandish orgies remain in tantalisingly brief glimpses. Certainly some amusement comes from character, but the comedy is generally broad enough to overwhelm the human content (this is a film made by someone who finds a prince in military uniform kicking his servant in the rear deeply hilarious). The separation of Danilov and Sally is a sequence of some desolate power, and the misunderstanding that prompts the climax would be genuinely moving if the rest of the film weren’t so trivial. Plenty of amusement, moments of startling oddness, but little of substance: a charming if rather disappointing frippery.

d Erich von Stroheim p Irving Thalberg sc Erich von Stroheim, Benjamin Glazer ph Oliver T. Marsh ed Frank E. Hull, Margaret Booth pd Cedric Gibbons, Richard Day cast Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Roy D'Arcy, Josephine Crowell, George Fawcett, Tully Marshall, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Xavier Cugat
(1925, US, 137m, b/w)