Word: stroheim
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Grand Illusion Jean Renoir Perhaps the most beloved film on any list of all-time greats, this World War I saga prefigures many a Great Escape prison-camp movie--it pits a German commandant (Erich von Stroheim) against two captured French officers (Pierre Fresnay and Jean Gabin) in a gradually warming debate on the codes of honor and survival. But Renoir the humanist is no sentimentalist, as the film's French title makes clear: La Grande Illusion translates as The Big Illusion. This was the first Criterion DVD release, and the supplements show that the company was on its game...
...apprentice films (I've seen five of the 10) give little indication of the achievements to come, but they have their moments. The Great Flamarion, with Erich Von Stroheim as a jilted, jealous lover, begins with a 1 min. 42 sec. opening shot, in which the camera perches outside a Mexico City vaudeville theater, pauses courteously while customers buy their tickets and present them to the doorman, then tracks slowly down the center aisle for the climax of a cape-twirling act and the beginning of a clown routine. We hear gunfire, and the scene changes; the shot ends...
...plagued by calamities that the only productive thing to come out of it was the disaster-movie documentary Lost in La Mancha. So many other projects have stalled that, at 64, Gilliam has joined the ranks of such hard-luck masters as Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim. He's as famous for the movies he hasn't finished as for the ones...
...preparing an American Masters program about you. Why still do stand-up when it's official--you're a master? The alternative is Sunset Blvd. You sit in a darkened room every day, and Erich von Stroheim comes in and asks you what episode of The Bob Newhart Show you want to watch. I'd rather keep making people laugh...
...some are trying to do that now, and film history is rich with examples where obsessive directors have been lauded for their bizarre on-set behavior and self-importance. Think of Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Sam Peckinpah, Erich Stroheim, and other filmmakers who at one point or another made films that became more about their personal psychoses than the films’ topics, which were things like greed, marital breakdown, the fallibility of nature, or cinema history. Given this list, perhaps the obsessive behavior is appropriate. Or perhaps they are (or were...