Upon his entry into America in 1909, Erich Oswald Stroheim (1885 – 1957) crowned himself Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim, embellishing his own legend before it began. Though the Austrian's mythic heritage involved a decorated military past and aristocratic background, von Stroheim's most notorious distinction became his relentlessly catastrophic relationship with Hollywood studios and the tragic fates that befell most of his cinematic output. If his films were not permanently mutilated by studios (Foolish Wives, Greed, The Wedding March) or turned over to other directors and altered forever (The Merry-Go-Round, Queen Kelly, Hello, Sister!), then they were simply lost (The Devil's Pass-key).

His embroidered persona masked relatively humble beginnings and a youthful struggle both personally and professionally. However, once he entered Hollywood as a European and military consultant, set dresser and extra, his meticulous eye for detail quickly attracted attention. Exploiting his unconventional looks, he sported dashing military outfits and paraphernalia, adding odd mannerisms when in front of the camera. After working as an assistant director on several pictures, he employed his eccentric magic on and off screen in D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) and obtained a leading role in Allen Holubar's propagandistic The Heart of Humanity (1918), which locked his villainous, monocled Hun persona securely in place. After the war ended, the evil German type that audiences "loved to hate" faded from popularity and von Stroheim needed a new role. This came with his directorial debut, Blind Husbands.

Credited as one of the first directors to portray his heroes and heroines as realistic, flawed characters who often succumb to desire, von Stroheim rejected stars and sentiment. The lights and darks in his cynical view of humanity were always shaded tones, highlighted with symbolic artistry and black humor. Offsetting a richly textured elegance with banality, filth and deviance, von Stroheim exposed aristocrats in their pajamas and mustache bands. He focused on aberrations, idiosyncrasies, and deformities, inserting debauched orgies and sexual fetishes wherever he could while masterfully conveying believable, intricate emotions in the face of the often-overwrought theatrics of silent cinema. The result is a kind of enchanted realism where sincerity, love and goodness are always under threat by greater forces – societal, carnal and spiritual.

Writing elaborate scripts and unfilmed backstories, von Stroheim became known for an exacting, at times totalitarian, directorship with long, rigorous shoots and obsessive attention to detail – down to the type of wristwatch an actor wore. Nevertheless, he accrued a legion of loyal cast and crew who followed him from picture to picture. Not so generous, however, were the Hollywood executives whom he exasperated with his unhappy, complicated and often, peculiar visions which took longer and longer form.

Nevertheless, Abe Lehr, a cohort of Samuel Goldwyn, did agree produce to von Stroheim's magnum opus Greed, the title alone oddly presaging the monumental treachery von Stroheim – and later directors like Orson Welles and Sergei Eisenstein – would encounter at the hands of their financiers. Flabbergasted by the inordinate length of a film that focused on the ugly underbelly of America, MGM cut the print into one-fourth its original length and melted down the rest for its silver content, a dramatically wrathful punishment for all of von Stroheim's past sins. Perhaps even more remarkably, the following year von Stroheim directed The Merry Widow, a crowd-pleasing romantic blockbuster.

Famously quoted as saying "In Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture," he could not escape his difficult reputation or his grandiose visions – both incompatible with the studio system. Von Stroheim was only able to release the first half of what was to be a two-part saga in the form of The Wedding March, while Queen Kelly – a stormy collusion of morbid content and bad timing – knocked von Stroheim out of the director's chair and back to acting. The last nail in his directorial coffin came with the strange and sexually frank Walking Down Broadway which reached audiences severely edited with no director credit as Hello, Sister!.

Beyond starring in mostly low-budget movies as parodies of himself, von Stroheim did enjoy a handful of significant roles. In Jean Renoir's classic Grand Illusion (1937), he plays a German pilot whose flaws and misfortunes are encapsulated by a somewhat comic neck brace which was, of course, von Stroheim's contribution. And his memorable turn in Billy Wilder's Five Graves to Cairo (1943) eventually brought him the role for which he is most widely remembered, Norma Desmond's enigmatic butler in Sunset Boulevard. Incidentally, the film sparked renewed interest in Queen Kelly – scenes of which appear as an example of Desmond's former glory – and poignantly reflect back that extra dimension of veracity which von Stroheim himself deemed so vital to art. In the end, his life and legend could be one of the most fascinating epics he crafted. The HFA is honored to conjure both the myth and the reality with screenings of all that remains of von Stroheim's original creations as well as his grand exit by way of Sunset Boulevard. — Brittany Gravely