Summary
On the precipice of post-war disillusionment, a counterfeit Count—Sergei Karamzin, silk-clad and serpentine—glides through a hallucinatory Monte Carlo where roulette wheels spin like guillotines. Beneath powdered wigs and gas-lamp halos, he stalks Helen Hughes, the dewy American envoy’s wife, while her husband signs treaties oblivious to the erotic espionage humming behind velvet drapes. Around them, a carnival of marionettes: Karamzin’s ‘cousins,’ a pair of prim catafalques in pearls; a counterfeit blind beggar whose cane conceals a stiletto; a maid whose pupils dilate with blackmail. The Riviera becomes a mirrored labyrinth: every casino chip is a wafer of sin, every palm frond a Judas kiss. Von Stroheim—both puppet-master and gargoyle—choreographs debauchery in cathedral shadows, intercutting liturgical pomp with close-ups of gloved fingers rifling through lingerie drawers. When a storm breaches the breakwater, the phantom aristocrat’s château floods, revealing currency-stuffed suitcases bobbing like bloated corpses. The final tableau—Karamzin shot, drifting face-down in a sewer grate as paper money spirals into the Mediterranean—renders the oldest sin: lust, forged into capital, sinks with the weight of gold.
A con artist masquerades as Russian nobility and attempts to seduce the wife of an American diplomat.
