Perhaps the feature of The Wedding March of most interest to Hollywood is the sidelight it casts on Eric von Stroheim as a director. In the previous paragraphs I have paid tribute to the brilliance of some of his work, but, even so, I do not rate him as a particularly capable director. I could name a dozen directors who with half the money and in half the time could have given us vastly superior pictures. Imagine Bill Howard with a million and a half dollars and from now on in which to make a picture. And the same goes for the rest of the dozen. In The Wedding March Von does several things that a good director would not do. He provides a setting so beautiful that in it the most exquisite love scene ever brought to the screen could be enacted- and he chops the scene into scores of close-ups that reveal him as lacking the ability to realize the possibilities that a more capable director would have grasped. To do him justice, however, I cheerfully admit that a few of the close-ups are extraordinarily effective, particularly one showing the head of Mitzi as she slowly is drawn across the screen to satisfy the passion of the roue whom she loves. A sequence showing George Nichols and Zasu Pitts, father and daughter, in conversation is presented entirely in close-ups which dance on the screen until they tire the eye. I would estimate that there are between seven and eight hundred close-ups in the entire picture, proving that Von treated Griffith's discovery as wildly as he did Pat's bankroll. Betz hands Fay Wray an illustrated paper, telling her as he does so that in it she will find something of interest about the man she loves. Does she grab it excitedly, having eyes only for what is printed about the man to whom she has given herself ? No. It is a moving picture, consequently she keeps her eyes on Betz's as she reaches slowly for the paper, holding the gaze for a long time after she obtains it, then lowers her eyes to study the paper. No director who would shoot such an idiotic scene can be called a master of his craft. A normal girl would not have gazed for a long time into the eyes of a man she hated as she reached for and held in her hand a paper containing news of the man she loved. They do it only in the movies, where they do a lot of other silly things except in pictures which are directed with complete intelligence. In another respect Von Stroheim shows himself to be a slave of motion picture conventions. There are many close-ups of Fay Wray showing her face smeared with glycerine. Besides being disgusting, the use of glycerine is wrong fundamentally. No really capable director would use it in scenes depicting an excess of grief. A suggestion of it in the eyes of an actress portraying only mild grief is permissible, but when the actress can work herself up to the portrayal of overwhelming agony of mind without shedding real tears an artificial agency should not be employed, for tears are not an infallible indication of grief. In Four Sons Margaret Mann does not shed tears when she receives word of the death of her sons. It was not her way of betraying a breaking heart. To have smeared her fine face with glycerine would have been an idiocy that Jack Ford had too much sense to commit. If Von Stroheim had risen above the little things that marred his picture The Wedding March would have been a masterpiece. It would have helped some also if he had shot it in something less than one hundred reels.

Wilfred Beaton, "Is Eric Von Stroheim a Really Good Director?," The Film Spectator, March 17,1928, page 8.

© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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