Firstly.... As much as I can always dig and be completely absorbed and entertained by a committedly melodramatic and beautifully ironic (without being that comic) Con-Man story like this one with Erich von Steoheim as the "Count," a fake aristocrat posing to get money off of a diplomats wife and the ups and downs he has in getting closer to her in the backdrop of Monte Carlo - and Stroheim himself as a performer understands what vicarious thrill an audience has not only in seeing him get very deep into this debonair POS but that he is going to go further into being a total scoundrel in his attempts to seduce and get closer to this wife (sometimes with her not being awake for his advances!) - there is one curious element about it to
There is a book in this world titled "Foolish Wives" written by none other than... Erich von Stroheim, and when we are shown a page of this book, it is a section admonishing uncultured Americans in comparison to Europeans and caring little for decorum in their practices of commerce. And.... it is just a very odd thing for von Stroheim to do, frankly kind of distracting. Like, imagine if in, I dunno, Paper Moon the characters were sitting around at one point reading a book called "Paper Moon" written by Peter Bogndanovich. It'd be a little batty!
Anyway, as for the rest of Foolish Wives it is moment to moment a film directed with a sensitivity to nuances in behavior and how what we know of what this man is capable of (and the couple other ladies who really know him and want in on the money potentially at hand) was surely ahead of its time, whether that was due to von Stroheim as an actor himself knowing how to milk every moment and drawn out piece of self-created theater from this character (his suave air and severe manner can be two sides of a coin, and eventually the begging) and his cast, not least of which Miss Dupont as the Naive and lovable mark err wife Mrs Hughes, but also others like the old lady at the Inn or the one maid who is on pins and needles about when this suave Russian Count will marry her, or that he knew what was going on in theater with the early Method and tapped into that.
It's also difficult to fully appreciate what is going on in the entire scope of the film's story because it is a truncated and cut-into work; to Stroheim/the studio's credit, you actually don't *quite* notice compromises until that scene with the Count and the desperate Maid as she begs him to marry (once he has the black armband on his uniform is the visual cue), but it's clear a lot of time has passed with reels missing, and one is not fully lose solely because of the framing snd context of this "Count" being a ruthlessness crook who may be going so deep into his Con he won't be able to get out so easily.
And yet, despite some jumps in the story, I am still enamored in the exquisite attention to details on screen in Foolish Wices, how vast Monte Carlo looks and set pieces like the casino games, while the filmmaker doesn't lose sight of this being about how such a setting was, and still probably would be today, ripe and rife for exploitation of trusts in the world of the upper crust and well to do; what's remarkable is how you do feel for Mrs Hughes all the more as the story goes on, part of that from Dupont playing her as someone more vulnerable and sweet natured (but not so that we necessarily want her to go down, at least the whole time) - and even with Sergius, even as he is so cruel and conniving you still sense his humanity in there, somewhere.
It's a richly drawn and textured crime melodrama where tragedy is just around every corner - and one helluva twist in the last act.
