WEEKEND RUBRICS: 3/15/26
MARCH MEDLEY .... A FILM, A COLLABORATIVE COMPOSITION, TWO BOOKS
BEFORE GOOGLE: The Wedding March
That’s Erich von Stroheim directing Fay Wray on the set of the 1928 Paramount film, The Wedding March, in which he also starred along with Wray and ZaSu Pitts. He wrote the screenplay as well for this silent movie that wasn’t silent. Audiences still had to read its dialogue but it was released with a synchronized score and sound effects. It also contains a section that is set at a celebratory Corpus Christi parade cast with 2000 extras and shot in Technicolor.
The story takes place in pre-WWI Vienna and concerns Prince Nikki, who has a title but no money to accompany it. His parents suggest aristocratically that he either marry someone with money or perhaps shoot himself. It is at that parade that his horse hurts a bystander, a lovely young woman named Mitzi, portrayed by Wray, who is the daughter of inn keepers and betrothed to a butcher. The prince visits her in the hospital and falls in love although his parents, deciding against his putting a pistol to his head, have arranged for his own marriage to Cecilia, the ZaSu Pitts character, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She limps.
In the arts section of the October 15, 1928 edition of The New York Times next to items about a new play by Upton Sinclair, Singing Jailbirds, opening at the Provincetown Playhouse, and Katharine Cornell’s upcoming starring vehicle to be directed by Guthrie McClintic, a stage adaptation by Margaret Ayer Barnes of Edith Wharton’s The Age Of Innocence, ran a rather snide review for the film by Mordaunt Hall whose given name in a byline does lead one to consider such snideness a precocious little prick’s birthright, his need for a teething ring giving way early on once he was free of the crib to a need to notice what was critical to his wellbeing with a verbal skill that had a biting ring to it.
“Erich von Stroheim's long-delayed picture, ‘The Wedding March,’ which can claim the distinction of having been through more vicissitudes than any other film (not excepting his ‘Foolish Wives,’ on which Carl Laemmle spent a fortune), finally is holding forth at the Rivoli Theatre,” wrote the mordant Hall. “In spite of its extravagances and its coarseness, it is a picture that holds the attention, but one that is never especially perturbing concerning its loves, its tears, its passions or its brutality. Because of what they are called upon to do and not because of the performances of the players the characters are not much more human than a troupe of Robots.
“As he did in several of his other productions, Mr. von Stroheim here uses hogs wallowing in their food as a symbol of the natures of one or two of his people. He also calls upon an individual who possesses all the gentility of a Bill Sykes type to register contempt by spitting. One is also confronted with the idea of scenes swinging from the lowly herd of swine to others of apple blossoms raining on a Prince, impersonated by Mr. von Stroheim himself, and a pretty girl.
“Mr. von Stroheim has a weakness for queer situations and exotic personalities, and the writer of the subtitles has lessened the importance of this film by lines that are more reminiscent of Broadway than Vienna. One is apt to watch the events with a curiosity as to what will be done next by this strange group of people.”
The screenwriter/director/star shot so much footage that Paramount demanded Stroheim create a second film from it titled The Honeymoon but it was never released and parts of it were edited back into The Wedding March for a later re-release of its own. The original print for The Honeymoon was lost in a fire in Paris in 1959.
In 2003, The Wedding March was included in The National Film Registry by the Library of Congresss for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.
In 2024, it became part of the public domain,
Here it is.
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