This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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One of my favourite places is the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy. For on each evening in the last week of June, this vast open space is converted into an open-air cinema for free screenings of classic movies, as part of the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival.

For a cinephile it is hard to top the experience of watching, say, Stanley Donen’s musical Singing in the Rain in the company of a few thousand people. This year I saw the latest restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922), a silent classic that is celebrating its centenary this year and was presented in a newly-restored version with live orchestral accompaniment.

Russian aristocrats were suddenly fashionable in 1922 Europe, having become exiles from the Soviet Union

Foolish Wives is a crime melodrama set in Monte Carlo, where someone purporting to be a Russian aristocrat and military officer, Count Sergius Karamzin, lives with his two cousins, Her Highness Olga Petchnikoff and Princess Vera Petchnikoff, at the rented Villa Amarosa.

Russian aristocrats were suddenly fashionable in 1922 Europe, having become exiles from the Soviet Union, and a fair few would later turn up in Hollywood seeking employment. But this trio is nothing but a bunch of grifters, preying on gullible rich tourists, passing counterfeit banknotes, and blackmailing foolish American wives.

Foolish Wives was Hollywood’s first million-dollar movie – its original budget of $250,000 was exceeded by a little over four times – and rejoiced in the fact through its publicity campaign. The film grossed more than $425,000 in the USA and a futher $400,000 worldwide, so it would have been a big hit in contemporary terms had it not been for the huge production cost.

Universal twice recreated Monte Carlo and its seaside promenade, once in Southern California and again at Point Lobos, in Monterey County, California, a set which had to be rebuilt after a storm.

The original cut of the film was somewhere between 30 and 32 reels, or six-and-a-half hours of screen time, which gives some indication of where the money went. The intention of director von Stroheim, who also starred as the monstrous Count Karamzin, was to show the film in two approximately three-hour instalments in two different movie theatres in each town, so that audiences could watch it on consecutive evenings, but cinema owners weren’t ready for such a commitment.

So the negative was cut, first to 15, and then 14 reels, which was the length used for the New York and Los Angeles premieres in early 1922. Thereafter it was further trimmed to ten reels, making it not only the first million-dollar movie but also the incredible shrinking movie.

On release, it fared well in theatres and the trade press contained articles in which big-city screen owners demanded more films like it.

The restored film I saw in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore was not, of course, the same film that delighted audiences in 1922, let alone von Stroheim’s original cut. From 2017 to 2022, in a collaboration between New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and Cineteca Bologna, Foolish Wives was painstakingly restored using materials from a 1928 print and a tinted and toned copy of the Italian release with Italian language titles that had been storied in a vault in Milan. The result is remarkable for its luminosity and image definition.

Foolish Wives struck me as astonishingly modern. Count Karamzin, strutting around in ever more stylish uniforms, perpetually adjusting his monocle the better to focus on his female victims, and puffing on elegant, impossibly long cigarettes, is a sexual predator beyond all else. As one of the titles memorably puts it: “Preparing to stalk the white doe, brass buttons are strong magic.”

The Count’s comeuppance takes place off-screen. Perhaps it’s just as well, because we find him beguiling, despite his depravity. Our last glimpse of him is as he sneaks through the bedroom window of a mentally disabled teenage beauty. Yet the censors in 1922 Kansas were more concerned to remove shots of women smoking than shots of sexual predation.

Also back in 1922, every print of the film, for both domestic and foreign release, was tinted and hand-coloured by Gustav Brock, who took three to four days to produce each one. This hand-colouring starts with a mere candle flame, but progresses to a spectacular conflagration at the Villa Amarosa. Von Stroheim chose to heighten emotion through such selective use of colour long before Steven Spielberg picked out the little girl in red in his otherwise monochrome Schindler’s List.

Reviewing the premiere for the Los Angeles Times, Edwin Schallert described Foolish Wives as “more decadently European than any picture that has come to this country from Europe.” The story did not “justify the lavishness of its production,” he wrote. “A crook story, whether it be laid in Monte Carlo or in Siwash is nothing but a crook story.” Movie audiences disagreed and have been coming back to see “crook stories” ever since.