La marcha nupcial

Von Stroheim stars as Austrian nobleman Nickolas von Wildeliebe-Rauffenberg. His family wants him to marry Cecelia Schweisser (Zasu Pitts), the crippled daughter of a wealthy business magnate. But Nicki meets the beautiful Mitzi (Fay Wray), a farm girl and harp player of low birth. Mitzi is being pursued by the loutish butcher Schani (Matthew Betz), but her heart pines for the dashing Nicki. Can their love survive the pullback from society?

Stroheim lavishes the screen with ornate costumes and settings that threaten to overwhelm the meager narrative. There's even a lengthy Technicolor segment showing a parade full of pomp and majesty. Wray is very good, sensual yet innocent at the same time. Pitts also manages to elicit pathos from a role that could easily have been a one-note villain. Stroheim encountered his usual post-production problems, and multiple editors were brought in to work on the film, including Josef von Sternberg. Some consider this a masterpiece, whereas I found it good, though not exceptionally so.

Leaving MGM (and Irving Thalberg) behind and joining Paramount, Erich von Stroheim worked with his co-writer Harry Carr to come up with a tale set in Stroheim's native Vienna, a tale as large and expansive as anything he had told. The production ran on for nine months after having essentially recreated a large section of 1914 Vienna on the Paramount backlot until the studio shut down production and forced Stroheim to cut a film with what he had. He ended up producing two films, The Wedding March and its now lost sequel The Honeymoon, and the first half (well, perhaps the first third, there was apparently talk of a third entry) feels truncated. The films were also victims of the transition to sound, getting left behind in the mad dash for talkies that Paramount was obviously not willing to give money to Stroheim to reshoot in order to accomplish. The end result is a nice film with a surprisingly hard edged finale that really feels like it was going to feed into something more but manages to stand well enough on its own.

Prince Nicki (Stroheim) is the only son of an old Viennese family that is running low on funds. He spends his nights pursuing expensive women and gambling, getting himself into financial holes that his father, Prince Ottokar (George Fawcett), refuses to help with the problem while his mother, Princess Maria (Maude George), helps him paper over the problems, but she extracts from him a promise that he will marry money, a woman of her choosing. He happily accepts, and in the tradition of these sorts of romantic operettas, Nicki instantly discovers the woman he actually loves, a common girl named Mitzi (Fay Wray), the daughter of an innkeeper who is purportedly betrothed to Schani (Matthew Betz), a butcher.

The movie is built out of extended sequences, the first of which is really where Nicki meets Mitzi, and it's where the film is at its most charming. Nicki is part of a military parade on Corpus Christi, stationed to the side as the Emperor Franz-Josef enters the cathedral. Nicki and Mitzi catch each other's eyes, and it's just a series of small, playful bits of mostly wordless banter between the two as things happen around them, mostly Mitzi's father (Cesare Gravina) and mother (Dale Fuller) engage with Schani, notice the flirting going on between their daughter and the notorious, penniless womanizer on the horse and in the uniform above them.

The romance between the two grows around a late night meeting where Nicki visits Mitzi at her window, taking her out to look at the beautiful Blue Danube River, but this happens while Prince Ottokar meets with the rich industrialist Fortunat Schweisser (George Nichols) to arrange the marriage of Nicki to Schweisser's daughter Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts). I mean...it was kind of predictable that Nicki's parents would figure out a less than ideal match (Cecelia has a limp) just when Nicki finds true love. It really is that kind of movie.

What this doesn't seem to be is the kind of movie where Nicki marries Cecelia, leaving Mitzi alone to try and save Nicki's life because Schani is so mad at what's going on that even though Nicki's marrying another woman, Schani can't take the shame and is planning on murdering Nicki as he walks out of his own wedding. This is either the most cynical ending of Stroheim's career outside of Greed, or it's essentially the second act turn that was going to get resolved in further story that probably would have been captured in The Honeymoon.

It's a largely nice look at Vienna in 1914, at ill-fated romance, and with a not entirely expected ending that sends our loving characters in vastly different directions. I wish The Honeymoon still existed in order to see how the story resolved (I imagine it's pretty standard romantic stuff and Nicki and Mitzi end up together), but this does feel like half of a story instead of something entirely completely. Still, the production design is impeccable (one of the film's cameramen got married on the set of the cathedral), enough so that when it was complete Stroheim reportedly declared that he was standing in the Vienna of his youth. The acting is good all around, and the romance is solidly built. Without the second half of the story, it feels like a trifle with an unexpected ending. Still, it's nice.

History paints Erich Von Stroheim as the great misunderstood genius, the `footage fetishist' whose grandiose films were too ahead of their time & too ambitious for producers with their `nickel and dime' mentalities. Irving Thalberg emerges as a major villain in this saga, sacking him first from Universal in the midst of shooting Merry Go Round, then hacking apart his masterpiece Greed over at MGM before sacking him again from The Merry Widow. By 26/7 Von Stroheim was running out of major studios to work for. Fortunately Merry Widow was a hit and he won backing from Pat Powers at Paramount for a two part epic critique of royalty. Only the first part survives, an executive changeover at Paramount occurred and new boss, B.P. Schulberg, took fright at the expense and failure of Part 1 and quickly dumped Part 2 on the European market where it vanished permanently. Von Stroheim was ostracized by the major studios and after two further abortive projects (Queen Kelly and Walking Down Broadway) he never directed again.

Whilst it's impossible not to feel sympathy with a man whose vision was too much for the industry of his time, the films themselves are often overloaded with details and appear stiff and pedantic when compared with the contemporary work of Vidor, Murnau, Lubitsch, Von Sternberg or DeMille. A good example of this is the scene where Fay Wray first sees Von Stroheim's prince. Partly filmed in 2-color Technicolor, this is a pleasure on the eyes, but an incident which should play out in 3 or 4 minutes is here stretched out to about 15. That would be fine if it was an isolated incidence or a dramatic high point, but this is the pacing Von Stroheim employs throughout. Whilst the result is impressive and strangely hypnotic, `Von Stroheim' time feels much slower than real time and the two hours of this film felt closer to three. Mannered as this is in a silent film, this style would've been painful indeed if attempted in sound.

Von Stroheim's direction reminds me of the theatrical producer Gordon Craig who in the early 20th century attempted to reproduce realism on stage with fully plumbed and working interior sets, real trees, gravel and soil for outside settings etc, even utilising giant tanks of water in which to stage shipboard scenes. Real objects are on stage, yes. but doesn't this miss the point of an audience engaging with players and text to create their own realism? Another result of this is an oddly dehumanizing one, as our attention is distracted from the interplay of characters by the piling on of detail. That for me is the basic problem with Von Stroheim Not to say Von Stroheim wasn't a great film maker, as Greed definitely proves. But I can't help feeling the cutting helped Greed more than hurt it. The recent TCM restoration, while fascinating and something to be grateful for, only serves to illustrate this, and in Wedding March we see just how indulgent the Von could become.

Choosing himself as leading man didn't help either. In The Merry Widow, John Gilbert was able to engage the audience through his charm and charisma. However here, Von Stroheim's impoverished Prince looks rather villainous and appears both cold hearted and kinky - not an endearing combination. He mostly gives a statue-like performance and only Fay Wray, vibrantly fresh and beautiful, engages us emotionally.

Admittedly the story becomes more gripping in the last half hour or so, and the ending (a surprisingly bitter one) made me wish the 2nd Part had survived.

It's definitely worth seeing, both as cinema and for what it tells us of this fascinating figure, but once is enough.

Erich von Stroheim directs himself in the lead in this silent film from 1928.The Wedding March tells about Prince Nicki (von Stroheim) who has to marry money.That is his parents' order.Cecelia Schweisser (Zasu Pitts) is one with money so he ought to marry her.But Nicki has fell in love with someone else.That someone is inn-keeper's daughter Mitzi Schrammell (Fay Wray).And she ought to marry the nasty butcher Schani (Matthew Betz).Who gets who in the end? Watch the movie and find out.Erich von Stroheim knew how to make good movies.As a filmmaker he was a perfectionist so maybe that's the reason why the result was so good.The lovely leading lady is the gorgeous Fay Wray who went on and starred King Kong five years later.This was her first starring role.Matthew Betz makes a great villain.Zasu Pitts gives a very touching performance as the limping Cecelia.One interesting detail about the film is that it contains an early Technicolor episode at the Corpus Christi festival.This melodrama from 80 years back is a fine example of movie-making at its finest.These romantic movies that are made today have often got the lack of magic.That wasn't the case in the silent era.

A sweet, sweet film full of apple blossoms, parades, and Miss Wray's delight at being bought a box of chocolates ... absolutely wonderful ... despite Nicki and Mitzi being perhaps the oddest odd couple you could find, it somehow works. Lingers in the mind a long time after viewing. Highly recommended.