The Wedding March

On the way to America in 1901, the son of a Jewish hatter in Gkeiwitz somehow became the aristocratic Erich von Stroheim and a former cavalry officer of the imperial Austro-Hungarian army.

Clearly a man who could invent himself with such success possessed formidable powers of persuasion and imagination, and he went on to demonstrate these forcibly during his brilliant, turbulent career as an actor and director in Hollywood.

Lovingly restored for Channel Four's Silent Film series by Kevin Brownlow, von Stroheim's Wedding March dates from 1926, with the addition two years later of an extraordinary technicolour sequence for the great Corpus Christi procession. It is set in 1914, just a few months before the outbreak of the first World War, and presents a cruel indictment of Viennese society during the decline of the Hapsburg Empire. Around an old-fashioned story of innocence betrayed, von Stroheim creates an infrastructure of telling vignettes, which start with a splendid early-morning row between a mature and high-born couple, move forward with the development of the relationship between cynical, worldly wife and dissolute son, then reach a frenetic climax with a brothel scene where two fathers arrange the marriage of their unwitting offspring for reasons which have nothing to do with love and everything to do with convenience.

Fay Wray, later famous for her part in King Kong, is the naive workingclass girl seduced and duly abandoned in favour of a more advantageous marriage by von Stroheim's Prince Nicki; and if the love scenes have a strong element of kitsch, expressed by a surfeit of apple blossom and soft-focus camera work, their sincerity cannot be faulted.

The absence of speech is hardly noticeable, and the spurious gemutlichkeit of the images on the screen is underlined by Carl Davis's eclectic score, drawing heavily on the music of the Strauss family as well as Brahms, Schubert and Wagner.