Hello, Sister! 1933. Directed by Edwin Burke and Alfred Werker (and Erich von Stroheim and Raoul Walsh, uncredited.)

(8/20/01)

Hello, Sister!, on the surface of it, has the look of an unpretentious, low-budget production. Yet, it is both intense and startling. It is certainly startling for its candor which is totally unexpected in a Hollywood movie of 1933.

Two young women decide to go for a stroll on Broadway one evening in hopes of meeting some nice young men. They get picked up and one is sexually aggressive in a way that is uncomfortable to watch. When they take the girls home he bluntly offers her a supposedly expensive ring for her favors. Upon being rebuffed he turns his attentions on a neighbor who is happy to oblige. But the ring turns out to be a fake.

The woman who did the rebuffing takes up with the other of the two men. They begin seeing each other. But then she goes to a doctor who tells her that she is expecting.

All of this is quite startling to find in an American film of the 1930s. But it is all very Erich von Stroheim and this is another film that was taken away from Stroheim and reworked by others.

A dog is hit by a car. As the couple walk over planks Zasu Pitts falls into an open sewer. Very von Stroheim. And the situation between the young man and the young woman (having been lied to by others, he has come to distrust her) is resolved by a building catching on fire, which recalls the climax of Foolish Wives.

It is all very adult fare and it is gripping. This film certainly has something to say about how loneliness in the big city makes women vulnerable. In fact, the whole picture struck me as a savage criticism of modern urban society.

Zasu Pitts is the only name in the cast that I'm familiar with. She plays the part of a spinsterish woman with a lot of repressed anger that comes out in one fabulous scene. She asserts that she has had lots of boyfriends and then lies about her friend Peggy's behavior towards her boyfriend which leads to him temporarily backing out of the marriage. (And Peggy is pregnant.) That scene is true, real, and painfully human.

Hello, Sister! stands up, in its present form, as a fine little film. I suppose one can wonder what it was like at the first preview before it was virtually remade, but I don't.

Foolish Wives. 1922. Directed by Erich von Stroheim.

(1/2/00)

This was a reconstructed print of Foolish Wives. A lot of it was dark. (The print had an overall murky quality.) Some shots which were incomplete were optically stretched out. In any case, it was only a fragment of what Erich von Stroheim intended. So the film was seen at a real disadvantage which was frustrating, but which at the same time lent it an air of rarity, of preciousness.

To me, Foolish Wives is probably the quintessential von Stroheim film. It is set in the "old world" of Europe and deals with decadence and depravity. Greed, which is his most famous film, is set in America and has a totally different milieu. Moreover, in Foolish Wives Stroheim directs Stroheim. And it is that character of Karamzin that one takes home from this film. Stroheim was known as "the man you love to hate" and here he is all swagger and rascality.

I think the main pleasure of this film is in watching the trio of crooks "getting away with it," especially since they do so in very elegant surroundings. They are caught in the end, of course, but it is still fun watching their shameless behavior. By contrast, the Americans seem kind of dull.

Foolish Wives, like other von Stroheim films, gives the sense of a crazy imagination let loose. And the "extravagance" he was so notorious for is the trace of an amazing energy. Whatever else one can say about it, Foolish Wives has its own special flavor. It is his Monte Carlo in the same way that a painter makes a place his own. The film is full of bizarre and grotesque touches--the counterfeiter's retarded daughter, the monk who arrives to interrupt Karamzin's seduction of Mrs. Hughes, and the maid Maruschka whom Karamzin gleefully swindles out of her life savings. There is a kind of inspired madness about Foolish Wives.

The plot is reminiscent of Henry James--innocent Americans thrust against not-so-innocent Europeans. Both Mr. and Mrs. Hughes learn and grow through the experience. Mrs. Hughes learns to appreciate her solid husband as opposed to sham; Mr. Hughes is wised up and learns to take charge of the situation, confronting Karamzin and knocking him down.

What interests me in watching Foolish Wives is that Mr. Hughes, the solid upright citizen, is lacking the qualities needed to satisfy his wife. She wouldn't be so susceptible to Karamzin if he were really fulfilling her. And I don't think that he really does learn to be dashing, challenging and sexy and to realize that these are qualities that he needs to bring to the woman he loves.
What are we to make of the man who has no arms? He certainly shows Mrs. Hughes that things are not always what they seem and that appearances can be deceiving. But when his cloak falls off and she suddenly realizes the situation and tenderly puts it back on, why the passive mak-like face? He doesn't even say thanks. It is a bizarre, puzzling moment.

In the print I saw we don't see Karamzin's death. We see him stealing into the house and waking Ventucci. I think the film cuts away and when it comes back Ventucci starts to drag the corpse. This is awkward and jarring. I wonder how it was meant to be seen and how it was seen in the 1922 release version.