Merry-Go-Round

Vienna, 1914-nobles and commoners, glamour and squalor-extravagantly imagined by Erich von Stroheim in this legendary production.

Erich von Stroheim's name is nowhere among the screen credits of Merry-Go-Round, but the obsessed and visionary director of Foolish Wives, Greed and the Wedding March wrote the story and script, oversaw the sets and consumes selected the cast and directed at least one-quarter of this lavishly-produced and fascinating 1923 film before he was fired by production head Irving Thalberg, who replaced him with Rupert Julian, a reliable journeyman. Merry-Go-Round became a symbol of studio dominance over creative, independent-minded directors, which obscured the uneven but fascinating film actually at hand.

In Vienna around the time of World War I, orgy-loving Count Franz Maximillian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry), posing as a necktie salesman, falls in love with innocent Agnes (Mary Philbin), an organ grinder in a concession at the Prater, the city's pleasure zone. Characters and incidents worthy of a text on deviance are ribs attached to this fairly straightforward spine: Franz's cigar-smoking betrothed, the sadistic brute and rapist Schani (George Seigmann) and his battered wife (Dale Fuller), the sensitive hunchback Bartholomew and his trained gorilla, royalty and circus freaks. Julian toned down Stroheim's original version and compressed his narrative, but still goes to the edge permitted by censors of the time to remain faithful to the material he inherited.