Blind Husbands (from 1919) remains the most astonishing directorial debut in the history of American movies. The film has been compared to Citizen Kane in that regard, but it has also been pointed out that Welles's startling debut was preceded by a significant body of work in theater and radio which brought him serious critical acclaim as well as national prominence, and made the phenomenon of Kane less surprising.
Erich Von Stroheim had worked as an assistant in various capacities on the Griffith lot and for director John Emerson, and he'd made a name for himself as a character actor doing variations on his trademark wicked Hun impersonation. He had, in fact, more practical experience of filmmaking than Welles did before he made Kane -- but there was nothing in his resume which could have prepared anyone for the mastery of the medium, the creative brilliance, on display in Blind Husbands.
In this film he managed to refine the documentary power of Griffith at his best and combine it with an expressionistic visual poetry worthy of Murnau. It has the feel of a work conceived for its medium alone, with no echoes of stage practice -- not surprising since Von Stroheim had no significant stage experience himself. (He had written one unproduced play.)
In his biography of the director, Richard Koszarski points out that Von Stroheim saw the importance of Griffith's obsessive concern with detail and authenticity in costumes and settings -- this was a key way of enthralling an audience and trumping stage practice, no matter how elaborate. Yet because Griffith usually looked to the melodramatic stage for his narratives and only occasionally explored interiors in purely cinematic ways, an aesthetic tension remained in his work -- he always seemed to have a foot in both worlds, that of the stage and that of the cinema.
The tension is dissolved in Blind Husbands. There is no sense, in either interiors or exteriors, of the theatrical "set". The camera seems to be exploring real places -- however idealized or fantastical.
Much has been made of Von Stroheim's obsession with seemingly insignificant details, as though it represented some kind of pathology, but this was crucial to his method -- to get actors to behave as though they were inhabiting real places, to convince audiences that they were watching (and vicariously inhabiting) real places.
Audiences and critics of the time recognized the power of this approach, even if they didn't always appreciate how it was achieved -- how it moved cinema one step further from the Victorian stage. Griffith could throw Lillian Gish out onto a real piece of ice on a frozen river, and in the same film shoot and stage an interior as though it were being enacted within a proscenium arch. It was the totality and integrity of Von Stroheim's realized vision of a cinematic universe that made Blind Husbands an immediate sensation.
The film cost a bit more than $100,000, and Universal spent slightly more than that promoting it -- but it brought in over $300,000 during its first year of release, at a time when the average Universal film was bringing in just over $50,000.
Making a film like Blind Husbands was obviously riskier than churning out programmers, but it represented a formula for commercial success all the same -- and one curiously similar to the blockbuster event-film formula currently followed in Hollywood. Today the money is most often spent on special effects -- but in Von Stroheim's day, his obsessive recreations and presentations of reality must have struck audiences as very special effects indeed, and every bit as thrilling, as cutting-edge, as exploding Death Stars.
It should be added that Von Stroheim's method is still thrilling, some 85 years on, in a way the startling digital effects of our time may not be in a few generations.
The film tries for a greater psychological complexity than conventional melodrama, and presents adulterous temptation with an erotic frankness unusual in its time, but it is still a rather ordinary love triangle at heart. It's the organic integration of the physical world into its drama and the power and beauty of its images which make it magical and memorable -- a purely cinematic masterpiece.
(All versions of the film available today derive from a cut-down re-release from 1924. About twenty minutes were removed, and the clumsy pacing and hurried feel of so many sequences in this version suggest that much of the cutting simply involved the trimming of individual shots. One can only imagine the power of the film if its images could be relished at a more leisurely pace.)
