santasprees

An outstanding and incredibly important film for which the director paid the highest price. The commitment and courage taken to relate these stories is extraordinary, The film craft needed to relate the events, from the microscopy and intensity of each interaction to the overwhelming macro-forces of history, politics and economics, is every bit as remarkable and only compounds the loss of Sato Mitsuo and his unmade body of work.

All the mutually-mated and mutated blue blood of the courts of Europe must have curdled into a brain-stunting stew long before 1760, so its fitting that Von Sternberg's vision of the Russian dynasty is so damaged and deranged, importing fresh Prussian genes (Dietrich as Catherine) to arrest the degenerative slide. Sam Jaffe's Grand Duke Peter (later, briefly, the Emperor Peter III) is Harpo Marx cross bred with Tiny Tim on the Island of Dr Moreau. Marlene Dietrich's Catherine, after an initial doe-eyed turn as an innocent, is an automaton of desire, arousing with one hand, castrating with the other, at once a vixen and a shrew shot through gauze and candles by a permanently stimulated lens. At its (wordless) best, a feast of ragingly intemperate psycho-sexual and psycho-historical motifs in a wobbly frame.

'Foolish Wives' is the 'Smile' (Brian Wilson, sandpits, fire engines) of world cinema. What wonders might reside in the lost reels when such sumptuous detail and glorious framing fill all that remains? It is as over ripe and decadent as the novels of Huysmans, with Von Stroheim, an amoral Count that drinks oxblood for breakfast, giving one of the most richly-textured variations on villainy ever seen on film.

For all its director's notorious largesse it is the intimate particulars and distillation of atmosphere that enchant: a sea breeze disturbing the drapes and dresses on a sunlit terrace, the Count's tortuously coy dance of seduction in front of the hotel, the interior of a garlanded boat in a bay illuminated by lanterns.