Erich Von Stroheim was above all else a wondrous spinner of tales. His storytelling mode was, at heart, melodrama, but much modified from its conventional forms. He embraced all the sensational elements of melodrama, its reliance on wild coincidence and its stark dynamic of good versus evil but subverted them to his own ends. He made the erotic subtext of much melodrama explicit, he used coincidence to serve his own fatalistic vision of human destiny, and he inverted expectations about protagonist and antagonist, making the former often weak and foolish and the latter invariably fascinating and appealing, especially when he himself played the role.
His vision of the world was brutal and harsh, but he preserved the romance and the celebration of virtue at melodrama's core -- in the form of his faith in a pure and spiritual love which could transcend the vagaries of fate, even if his version of such love often existed outside the realms of strict propriety.
He was a popular artist of his time, speaking to audiences in a language they could understand, even as he extended the expressive and thematic range of that language. Of the seven films he completed only three were released to the public in versions close to what he intended, and all three made money -- quite a lot of money. Von Stroheim knew his public and its taste, and we err when we accept too quickly the judgment of the studio executives who decided that this public would not have accepted his four mutilated films in the longer versions he originally prepared. We will never know for sure, of course, but it's an insult to a popular artist of Von Stroheim's stature and achievement not to give him the benefit of the doubt on this score and to accept uncritically the verdict of the creative mediocrities who vandalized his films.
The tale Von Stroheim concocted for what would have been his fourth film, Merry-Go-Round, is perhaps his most romantic -- inspired as it was by his nostalgia for the old Vienna he grew up in, the one that vanished forever in the catastrophe of WWI. Von Stroheim's participation in this old Vienna was not what he claimed it to have been -- it was part of his dream world from the start -- but it was at the center of his imaginative life and he seems to have felt its loss just as keenly as (perhaps more keenly than) the loss of something real.
In Merry-Go-Round, Agnes becomes a symbol of the innocence and allure of the dream of old Vienna -- one which redeems the deceitful and hypocritical Count Hohenegg, and by extension the whole corrupt superstructure of the Hapsburg fantasy. That fantasy was worthwhile, Von Stroheim seems to say, if it could make a place for dreamy, waltz-inflected nights at the Prater, and for Agnes, the sweet incarnation of those lyrical interludes.
When we think of dreamlike films, or dream sequences within films, we might be tempted to think of the expressionistic style filmmakers often use to signal a dream state -- but of course real dreams do not present themselves in that way. We might, in a dream, find ourselves at home and discover a previously unnoticed door opening onto a previously unsuspected wing of the house -- but that wing is not appointed like the cabinet of Dr. Caligari . . . it is as convincingly real a place, in the dream, as the actual house we know.
Von Stroheim appropriated this aspect of actual dreams to give his cinematic universe the power of the dream spaces we concoct, with a similar attention to detail, in our sleep. This was Von Stroheim's way of seducing us into his dreams, making us take them seriously. It was a storyteller's strategy -- not, as has often been suggested, some kind of neurotic obsession with "realism", much less an egotistical extravagance. While Von Stroheim was obsessing over his "extravagant" sets he himself lived in an exceedingly modest home in Hollywood, and led a mostly mundane and largely domestic private life.
Von Stroheim was the first great director to realize consciously that movies alone could use this illusion of a coherent and convincing dream universe to give power and depth and weight and resonance to an ordinary tale, to overwhelm us with the subliminal power of an actual dream.
Von Stroheim was fired from Merry-Go-Round somewhere between a quarter and a third into the shooting. The story was rewritten and the shooting completed by Rupert Julian, a studio hack appointed by the dazzlingly mediocre producer Irving Thalberg. Enough remains of Von Stroheim's vision to show us what the film might have been -- and there is more than enough of Julian's work on display to make the genius of Von Stroheim's method stand out in stark contrast.
Julian's mise-en-scène is theatrical and uninventive, without a trace of plastic imagination. He does not place us inside a dream universe but at the edge of a stage. We don't have the sense of being someplace but of looking at something. Julian also encourages his actors to act -- in an exaggerated theatrical style that several of them had no training or capacity for, and that violates in all cases the more naturalistic and engaging style Von Stroheim knew how to elicit even from novices.
Despite all that, the performances of Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin are revelations. Kerry was playing his first important role here, and Philbin her first role of any kind (apart from a walk-on in Foolish Wives.) Kerry was a small-time actor whom Von Stroheim here elevated to star status -- and we can see in his performance what Von Stroheim saw in him. He's sort of like a laid-back, less boyish John Gilbert, with tremendous masculine authority, which seems utterly natural and utterly appealing in those scenes directed or influenced by Von Stroheim but which vanishes entirely in those scenes in which he is called upon to emote in a more conventional (though already anachronistic) style.
Philbin was an actual discovery of Von Stroheim's -- he'd named her as the winner of a publicity-stunt beauty contest he judged in Chicago. She has real charm and power in Merry-Go-Round, and also a totally convincing naturalness -- except when Julian persuades her to try for the high style, at which point she seems merely competent. Her generally undistinguished performance in The Phantom Of the Opera must be attributed directly to Julian's cluelessness and bad taste as a director of film actors, because she was an artist of genuine talent and potential. (The fact that she became one of Universal's biggest stars in the Twenties is yet more evidence of Von Stroheim's insight into the popular taste of his time.)
Much of Von Stroheim's dark vision of human behavior was removed from the reworked version of the tale given to Julian to execute, which makes the romantic idealism that triumphs in the end seem a bit saccharine. Dimwits like Thalberg didn't understand how dark elements could set off and energize the positive and redemptive themes always present in Von Stroheim's work.
Universal called its prestige releases Super-Jewels. The existing version of Merry-Go-Round is a Super-Rhinestone -- but in it we can see reflected a great masterpiece, the film Von Stroheim might have made without the intervention of Irving Thalberg and his all-too-perfect alter ego Rupert Julian.