Way more than Norma's butler

By Susan King

Jan. 9, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

He was the “Man You Love to Hate.” Considered by some to be the director who most influenced European filmmakers, he was admired by the likes of France’s Jean Renoir and the Soviet Union’s Sergei Eisenstein. During the silent era, he was a contemporary of such directors as Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith.

However, Erich von Stroheim is known less today for the films he directed than for his Oscar-nominated performance as Max, the bald, stern and stoic butler to Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood classic, “Sunset Boulevard.”

As the story unfolds, it is learned that Max not only had been Norma’s husband but a famous Hollywood director who fell out of favor with the studios. And in the ultimate irony, the silent film clip used in “Sunset Boulevard” is from the unfinished 1929 Swanson film “Queen Kelly,” which Von Stroheim directed.

Though biographies have been written and documentaries produced about the actor-director, few have been able to truly crack the well-crafted myth surrounding his very public persona. But a new exhibition and film retrospective hope to look at the man behind the myth.

“Erich von Stroheim: A Life Discovered,” opens Jan. 21 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Fourth Floor Gallery and features previously unseen material from the Von Stroheim collection of the academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.

The academy exhibition is curated by Rick Schmidlin, who received acclaim for his 1999 reconstruction of Von Stroheim’s 1924 masterwork, “Greed,” which, through the use of stills, restored the film to its four-hour length.

Schmidlin discovered the Von Stroheim material a few years ago while visiting a woman named Jacqueline Keener, the sister of the woman Von Stroheim lived with the last 20 years of his life, at his estate outside Paris. Keener presented him with 15 boxes of stills (400 of them) and more than 1,000 documents, including scrapbooks, letters and manuscripts. Through the efforts of Schmidlin and members of the library staff, Keener donated the material to the academy.

“It ... tells his true story,” Schmidlin says. “There is his original script for ‘Blind Husbands,’ his contracts for ‘Greed.’ It has always been known that Irving Thalberg fired him off of the ‘Merry-Go-Round,’ but now we have the two-page letter he received from Thalberg.”

Director and actor

Among the movies screening at the retrospective are “Blind Husbands” (1919), his first hit; 1922’s “Foolish Wives”; “Greed” and 1928’s “The Wedding March” and “Tempest.” The festival also includes several films he acted in, including “Sunset Boulevard,” 1932’s “The Lost Squadron,” 1937’s “Grand Illusion,” 1943’s “Five Graves to Cairo” and 1945’s “The Great Flamarion.”

“Very few people get to see Erich von Stroheim’s films, mostly because they were silent,” says Dennis Dorsos of Milestone Film & Video, who restored “Queen Kelly” nearly two decades ago. “There is this perception of him of being silent, of being old and being disregarded. But his films are modern, they are funny.... “

“Most of his films always had a happy ending. Almost all had a romantic feel while at the same time dragging his characters through the mud. There is rape, suggestion of incest. There are poor girls being whipped.”

“He took the popular conventions of Ruritanian romantic drama and turned them on their edge and created what were then perceived to be very realistic portraits,” adds film historian Bob Birchard. “The prince in the white uniform was turned into a lecherous debaucher. With ‘Greed,’ which was more or less a modern-day story, he presented characters warts and all. At that time, mostly we were seeing idealized portraits of the hero and the heroine. But in Von Stroheim films, the hero became the villain.”

Born in Vienna in 1885, Von Stroheim came to New York in 1909 and quickly created an elaborate back story for himself, saying he was the son of Prussian nobility. Actually, he was the son of a lower-middle-class Jewish hat maker.

He began his 40-year film career in 1914 as a bit player, became an advisor on military costumes and customs and worked his way up to be an assistant director. In 1919 he turned to directing with “Blind Husbands,” which was based on his short story. He cast himself as a slick cad, an Austrian cavalry officer who tries to seduce the neglected wife of a surgeon.

In 1923, Von Stroheim began production on what is considered his masterpiece: “Greed,” based on Frank Norris’ book “McTeague.” Shot on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, early versions von Stroheim screened clocked in between eight and 10 hours. The director cut it to four hours, but MGM -- for whom he was making the movie -- was unsatisfied and removed him from the project. Thalberg, now at MGM, pared it to about 140 minutes for release. Von Stroheim disowned this version.

Von Stroheim directed a few more films and eventually went to France to live. He acted sporadically over the years but never directed after 1933. He died of cancer in 1957.

Erich von Stroheim: A Life Discovered

Where: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Fourth Floor Gallery, 8949 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Friday, noon-6 p.m. weekends, beginning Jan. 21

Ends: April 17

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or go to www.oscars.org

Schedule

Jan. 20: “Blind Husbands” at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8 p.m.

Subsequent screenings at 7:30 p.m. at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theater

Jan. 21: “Foolish Wives”

Jan. 22: “Greed,” reconstructed version

Jan. 28: “The Merry Widow,” “Merry-Go-Round”