A young impoverished aristocrat falls in love with an inn-keeper's daughter, but has to marry money.
Erich von Stroheim Fay Wray George Fawcett Maude George Cesare Gravina Dale Fuller Matthew Betz Zasu Pitts George Nichols Hughie Mack Sidney Bracey Anton Vaverka Albert Conti Claire Delmar Ray Erlenborn Danny Hoy Hans Joby Tiny Jones Arthur Lubin Ida May Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink Wilhelm von Brincken
La marcha nupcial, La symphonie nuptiale, Sinfonia nuziale, 结婚进行曲, Třikrát svatba, Bröllopsmarschen
USANR
Sweden15
Sweden
USA
“They say I give them sewers — and dead cats! This time I am giving them beauty. Beauty — and apple blossoms! More than they can stand!” - Stroheim
1928: already Stroheim gives us a work which unmasks the history of cinema as a history of consumable fairy tales and illusions. For me, this is the greatest of all silent films, the seminal work of this proto-Brechtian director who is more class-conscious than the Soviets. All but one of Stroheim’s existent films remain truncated - and it’s interesting that the least sophisticated (Blind Husbands, a film which is certainly not unsophisticated) is the only one that remains in Stroheim’s intended version. Yet these works are like Greek statues - cinema…
1st Erich Von Stroheim
Von Stroheim may have been the absolute Nth degree in obnoxious cruelty but you need arrogance and gumption to make cinema that goes as hard as this. On the surface, this is ruthlessly anti-sentimental filmmaking, as sneeringly hard-hearted against the practical realities of love as you can possibly imagine. The class structures of Vienna are too entrenched to ever make a relationship between a commoner and one of the aristocracy work, and marriage is a social sham made only to appease a greater sense of order and increase financial opportunity. Not a single punch is pulled in that depiction of venality and personal interest, and it is utterly depressing to watch. Von Stroheim's intense manner of…
Stroheim is cinema's first true modernist: this bit by Hanns G. Lustig upon the release is a great summation of what this film is about - "a colored fairy tale. But the colors are poisonous. Stroheim is a hard man. But his toughness shows the memory of the tender falsehood of dreams. And his melancholy revenge for their existence is brutal cartoons." Like Queen Kelly, this is really a kind of fairy tale gone awry, but unlike that following work, these ideas are incorporated in nuances and sublties, making it seem even more sophisticated than that later full-blown assault. A real tragedy - because it's about the illusory nature of romanticism - everytime we see the most beautiful moments of…
Spectacle and/as anti-spectacle: maybe narrative cinema actually did peak in 1928. Last write-up more or less covers most of it, but I underwrote how Stroheim shows us equally the value of images while criticising them. Sometimes we have to learn the value of love by its negation. A great masterpiece, and my favorite silent film.
Austrian-American Erich von Stroheim is an actor and director who deserves continuous re-assessment. He was infamous for his obsessions, disinterested in adhering to allocated budgets, untroubled by run times and carefree with production scheduling. He routinely shot multiple takes, amassing hundreds of hours of film in the process - occasionally of scenes so scandalous that he already knew the censors would never approve any part of them. The Wedding March delivers a thorough portrayal of an ancient overindulgent nobility vastly going to seed, interested only in memorialising its lazy way of life. While his images are perhaps the prime magic of the film, it naturally doesn't hurt that some solid performances bolster them. Thus, while the film is a minor effort from the silent-era figure when compared against Greed or Foolish Wives, it's still a satisfying film.
Watched with that one Llama who happens to be Swedish.
My first film from the self-titled Man You Love to Hate, The Wedding March is a gloriously lavish, painfully incomplete vanity project, which sees Erich von Stroheim showcase an astonishing portrait of decadent Imperial Austria with extravagance and wickedly ironic melodrama. Given von Stroheim's uncompromising attitude to filmmaking means that none of his films ever released exactly how he wanted and it's no different here, vastly over budget, vastly behind schedule and vastly self-indulgent, including the use of thousands of litres of real champagne and locking his cast on a sealed set to shoot an orgy... Silent film directors are insane. It's tragic to remember that even with everything going…
Stroheim’s cinema is the ur-text of irony not just in cinema, but of the irony of cinema. As an institution and framework in itself that engenders exploitation on the basis of what we might call a dialectic-of-beauty, of a beauty and romanticism that comes naturally to its forms but also, naturally, lies to us. Where there is a promise to images (to life, to love, to “purity”, to class mobility) offered in those images which is just as soon sundered by the diseased state of spectacle and that which allures, an inherently political dialectic not only because the film is about the sacrifices and imbalances of capital and class, but because cinema’s recreative potential lends itself to spectacle so fundamentally,…
Is this... the greatest film ever made?
There is no one like von Stroheim. God, just the play of erotic surfaces and objects as Nicki and Mitzi meet -- everything they touch or see becoming a surrogate for the other -- so that when they finally do kiss an hour into the movie it feels redundant. Everything suffused with such sensuality and perversity, and the characters themselves dissolving into abstract figures of desire in light, the film itself the final surrogate object. There is nothing that can reach what he makes out of it.
One of my 1000 recommended films.
Watched again at the BFI Southbank. Is this unusual silent feature still a five star film?
The answer is yes. Fay Wray gives a great performance as Mitzi, whether coyly flirting with von Stroheim's Nicki, fighting off her butcher beau, or going to confession.
The Von himself is convincing as the Prince who surprises himself by falling for a commoner, even if he is way too old to court Wray.
Just a sweet film which will also surprise you with its frankness and a rare dramatic role for ZaSu Pitts, who is wonderful in a small but pivotal part.
Many say Greed is Stroheim's classic, and of course that's a good film, but I think The Wedding March is his masterpiece.
The Wedding March is a silent romantic drama film written by Harry Carr and directed by Erich von Stroheim.
Set in Vienna in 1914, Prince Nicki is the descendant of a ruined noble family and is the commander of a cavalry regiment. During a parade in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral, Nicki notices that the innkeeper's beautiful daughter, Mitzi, is among the crowd. He and Mitzi flirt during the parade.
Nicki visits Mitzi at the pub where she works as a harpist and soon they start dating and fall in love. Unfortunately Nicki is approached by a wealthy factory owner into marrying his daughter Cecilia, Nicki initially refuses, but eventually agrees to marry Cecilia, which creates an obstacle and puts…
chaotic of me to watch this while in the middle of transcribing WEDDING REHEARSAL (very much not the same movie, lol). beautifully sad but i cannot get over how this was supposed to be just the first half of the film and that paramount made von stroheim split this into two films then proceeded to LOSE PART 2 IN A FIRE??? and the plot of that film THE HONEYMOON makes the end of this film look quaint.
thinking about how fay wray's two options for romance were a man who is constantly like inhaling sausage links and a prince who every girlie in the land wants to smooch. and von stroheim was like i shall play the prince :)
