Merry-Go-Round
by Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Cesare Gravina, Edith Yorke, George Hackathorne, Mary Philbin, Norman KerryDirector: Erich von Stroheim, Rupert Julian
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Ben F. Reynolds
Writer: Erich von Stroheim
Producer: Irving Thalberg
Writer: Finis Fox
Writer: Harvey Gates
Writer: Mary O'Hara
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Silent
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-04-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Merry-Go-Round
Movie Review: Von Stroheim Goes for a Spin
Summary: 4 Stars
Film historians generally-and in my opinion, rightly-consider Erich von Stroheim to have been among the greatest directors in movie history. But none of Stroheim's major works, starting with Foolish Wives, survives today in the form he intended. Of his mutilated masterpieces, The Wedding March probably comes closest to realizing his intentions. The picture was edited by another "von," Josef von Sternberg, who probably understood as well as any outsider could have what its creator had set out to do, and who gave the movie a compulsively vibrant intensity, as if Maurice Ravel's La Valse had been transferred to celluloid. But Stroheim never forgave him this act of lese majesty.
Merry-Go-Round was commenced after Stroheim had finished Foolish Wives at Universal, but Irving Thalberg, appalled by the director's contempt for budgets and refusal to knuckle under to the studio's demands, fired him and handed over the picture to the hack Rupert Julian, who got sole credit for the direction. Nevertheless, at least the first half of the movie shows the influence of Stroheim. Thalberg may have wanted to show Stroheim who was boss, but he by no means had a low opinion of the latter's abilities and would hardly have scrapped the footage that had already been shot out of spite (but see the note below).
Anyone familiar with The Wedding March will have no difficulty in recognizing in Merry-Go-Round a preliminary sketch for the later film. In Vienna just before the outbreak of World War I, an aristocratic but impoverished roué, Franz Maxmillian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry) meets a poor girl, Agnes Urban (Mary Philbin) who works at a concession in the Prater. The girl herself is being hotly pursued by the brutal Schani (George Siegmann), owner of the concession, but is also the object of affection of the pathetic hunchback Bartholomew Gruber (George Hackathorne), whose pet orangutan eventually metes out Schani's just deserts.
Kerry and Philbin were stars of the period probably best remembered for playing opposite Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera. They give adequate performances, although they pale in comparison to the trio of von Stroheim himself, Zasu Pitts, and Fay Wray in The Wedding March. Cognoscenti will also be able to easily spot such Stroheim regulars as Dale Fuller, who plays Schani's wife, and Cesare Gravina as the father of Agnes, performers whom Stroheim cast in similar roles in The Wedding March. Nor would they be likely to overlook the appearance of a truly legendary name among the technical credits: that of the great cinematographer William Daniels, the co-photographer of Merry-Go-Round, who went on to shoot Greed and The Merry Widow.
Von Stroheim's early works like Foolish Wives and this film were lurid melodramas that hovered between Griffith at his most sensationalistic and what might have resulted had someone let loose R. Crumb amid the ruins of the Hapsburg empire. Merry-Go-Round is emphatically not "Vienna, City of My Dreams"! But Stroheim was not interested in stripping bare the vices of the upper class just for whatever malicious pleasure it might have afforded him. Owing to repression, the vice which avows itself frankly in the lower classes takes on more extravagant, more refined, more perverse-and thus more aesthetically interesting-forms in the upper reaches of society. Here, but far more impressively in The Wedding March and Queen Kelly, Stroheim observes the antics of such etiolated specimens of a once powerful aristocracy with the rapt fascination of a zoologist studying the death throes of a species facing imminent extinction.
It may come as a surprise to younger movie buffs to find out that Stroheim was esteemed in his heyday as a "realist." Certainly from a present day perspective Stroheim's great films come across as the product of a highly idiosyncratic imagination-and seem about as realistic as a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral. Yet starting with his next production, Greed, Stroheim's pictures not only became more technically audacious-especially in his use of tightly intercut close-ups-but also moved away from caricature into far more probing analyses of human behavior. While only a minor part of the von Stroheim corpus, Merry-Go-Round supplies a link between the earlier and later works, making it indispensable viewing for anyone who wants to study the surviving evidence of this astonishing director's career.
It is always worth keeping in mind that Stroheim had worked under D.W. Griffith, and evidently absorbed Griffith's visionary approach to film art-not to mention his preference for shooting movies on an epic scale. But von Stroheim's unremitting gaze exchanged Griffith's heliotropic apocalypses-Intolerance fittingly bears the subtitle "A Sun Play of the Ages"-for cosmic dramas of entropy. However, Stroheim was no cynic. His fascination with depravity sprang from a sense of outrage at the injustice of the universe and a desire to peel back the excrescence of centuries of civilized hypocrisy in order to show the truth of the human condition as he saw it. Stroheim's preferred terrain was Central Europe in its last throes of decadence, but when he cast his eye on the New World in Greed and Hello, Sister, it didn't look any more promising, just cruder.
David Shepherd has been responsible for a number of valuable restorations of important older films on DVD. Combining-and digitally remastering-two 16mm prints, he has done an impressive job with Merry-Go-Round. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for this outstanding DVD. This version preserves the original tinting and also boasts a stereo musical track based upon the score for the silent film.
New note: The excellent Kino Video DVD of Queen Kelly contains the sequences from Merry-Go-Round thought to have been shot by Stroheim as well as supplementary materials relating to the production of the film.
Summary of Merry-Go-Round
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