'He is the best novelist of the films,' Erwin Piscator said of Erich von Stroheim, whose Wedding March (1928) he likened to a novel by Balzac. That was the last film Stroheim completed as a director. He may be better known as an actor ('the man you love to hate', La Grande Illusion, Sunset Boulevard), but in the history of film he made more of a mark as a director. It was his accumulation of detail that earned Stroheim a place in old film histories as the exemplar of realism. It also added to the cost and length of his pictures. Again and again he ran into trouble with his producers. His films were taken away from him and cut against his wishes - Greed (1924) being the most famous case. After a while nobody would employ him behind the camera; his career as a director lasted barely a decade. This was the second reason for Stroheim's place in old film histories: he represented the artist at odds with the commercialism of Hollywood. The tendency in more recent film histories has been to regard the artist with suspicion and to side with the 'genius of the system'; Stroheim's reputation has suffered as a result.

LRB 14 December 2000 | PDF Download