Erich von Stroheim

Biography

Erich Oswald Stroheim slipped into the world in 1885, Vienna’s Jewish quarter, the son of a Prague-born mother, Johanna Bondy, and a Silesian hatter, Benno Stroheim, whose shop in Gleiwitz (today Gliwice, Poland) smelled of brimstone and felt. Apprenticed to the family trade, he soon traded brim for brimstone and sailed to the United States around 1909, carrying nothing but a forged officer’s passport and an accent sharp enough to slice bread. Hollywood found him in 1914: a small man with a monocle screwed tight as a vise, hired by D. W. Griffith to glare from the margins of the frame. When America marched to war, the studios needed a face that audiences could boo; Stroheim’s sneer fit the Kaiser’s uniform so perfectly that he wore it in film after film. Once the armistice silenced the guns, the roles vanished, so he stepped behind the camera and turned obsession into policy. On Foolish Wives he demanded that Monte Carlo be rebuilt on the California coast—down to the unseen regulation underwear of Austrian guards—until the budget ballooned past a million 1921 dollars. Goldwyn’s accountants screamed; the public queued around the block; the studio chopped a third of the footage anyway. Irving Thalberg fired him mid-shoot on Merry-Go-Round and handed the reins to Rupert Julian, but Stroheim barreled straight into Greed, a 42-reel, seven-hour monument to human appetite. MGM hacked it down to ten reels and still left audiences stunned, as if they had stared into the sun. Undaunted, he filmed The Wedding March so expansively that even its unfinished negative was cleaved into two European releases. Finally, on Queen Kelly, Gloria Swanson pulled the plug after he reshot—frame by frame—scenes already approved by the Hays Office, doubling the budget with no end in sight. Another $200,000 bought her a printable version; it bought Stroheim exile from the director’s chair. He never commanded a set again, yet sound restored him to the other side of the lens: a wheezing, gravel-voiced relic of Old Europe, selling menace and melancholy by the yard while the reels spun on without him.