A Film Canon

This extraordinary film subverts melodrama to an even greater extent than Foolish Wives, refusing to draw any distinction between love and rape, matrimony and death, or the virtuous heroine and the prying, miserly, maid. Spatially, this corresponds to a collapse of inside and outside, enhanced by the most powerful depth-of-field that I have seen to date, as well as by von Stroheim's unprecedented obsession with shooting on location, here elevated to a rudimentary form of method acting, with the cast required to live in the building in which the action took place. Not only does this allow for complex, ambiguous mise-en-scenes, but it provides access to spaces previously considered off-limits for mainstream cinema, including toilets, cheap meat markets and, most spectacularly, the muddy, rainy wasteland in which the central couple share a picnic, perched at the end of a lengthy sewage pipe. In fact, it may be that von Stroheim's most radical gesture is to collapse beauty into disgust, reducing them both to a common visceral denominator. This viscera makes its strongest appearance in the revolting wedding feast, in which family and friends gnaw at sheeps' heads, while the reduction itself is most evident in the heroine's startling physical transformation, as well as the stash of coins that engender it, whose glistening, alienating allure finds its geographic corollary in the magnificent Death Valley climax, during which many of the cast and crew suffered from some form of heat affliction.