Thwarted and truncated directorial careers are among the depressing glories of the art of movies. Early in the history of cinema, the budgets of films grew in step with directors’ expanding ambitions, and so producers started to exert greater control—and to judge directors severely on commercial results. In the case of Erich von Stroheim, one of the most innovative directors in the silent-film era, such judgments cost him his career while he was only in his forties, when the plug was pulled on his 1929 film “Queen Kelly” midway through the shoot. The film, the last in Stroheim’s history-making ten-year run of silents, has become one of cinema’s most famous unfinished works, seen—when seen at all—in rival incomplete versions. The release of a new reconstruction and restoration by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, of Milestone Films, (opening at Film Forum on January 16th) is, therefore, a major event. Doros (who produced a previous restoration of the film in 1985) and Heller have found additional unseen footage and used Stroheim’s original script to give a sense of what the film’s dénouement might have looked like had shooting been completed.

The new version provides the fullest view yet of what might have been, of the mighty vision destined to remain stranded in its script, and it suggests a whole lost future of movies that Stroheim never got to make. It’s also a reminder that he is one of the great first-person filmmakers—the peer of Buster Keaton and Orson Welles, to name two other greats whose careers were similarly stifled by industry meddling and rejection. Stroheim’s direction, writing, and performances constitute a unity of exalted individuality, in style, form, and substance. His output is not only aesthetically thrilling but was fundamental in the development of the studio system, and is emblematic of the central wonder of the cinema itself—the fact that an unwieldy machine of mere recording became, in the hands of artists such as Stroheim, an instrument of intimate confession as controlled as a paintbrush and a vehicle of spectacle as thunderous as grand opera. The effort and the expense required to achieve such mighty results proved to be Stroheim’s downfall, with the troubled production of “Queen Kelly” dealing the final blow to a career that had long been fraught with frustrations, interruptions, and conflicts.

The project brought together several major figures in and out of movies. The title role was played by Gloria Swanson, one of the divas of the silent-film era, who co-produced it with her then lover, the tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy. Stroheim didn’t cast her; rather, as co-producer, she and Kennedy hired Stroheim as writer and director, and she signed off on the story. The action takes place mostly in the gilded world of pre-First World War Europe, in the fictitious monarchy of Cobourg-Nassau, where the deranged and domineering Queen Regina V (Seena Owen) keeps an aristocratic Army officer and famous playboy, Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron), as her lover and soon-to-be husband. While he’s on maneuvers with his squadron—under orders from Regina, to keep him away from other women—the nuns and students of a convent school happen to pass by. He catches the eye of an orphaned young woman in the nuns’ charge, named Patricia Kelly (Swanson), and their comedic flirtation, though it occurs at a distance, is brazenly ribald (involving her accidental loss of her panties). That night, Wolfram extracts the young woman, whom he addresses by her Irish last name, from the convent and—in an extended, playfully effervescent set piece—pursues the relationship behind the Queen’s back and under her royal roof. When the Queen finds out, she seizes a whip, thrashes Kelly out of the palace, and places Wolfram under arrest. Kelly attempts suicide; then, returned to the convent, she receives a telegram summoning her to the deathbed of an elderly aunt, in Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania but, at the time the film is set, was the colony of German East Africa. When she arrives, the dying aunt—who, it turns out, runs a brothel—pressures her into marriage with a rich and repulsive old slave-owning land baron. Kelly then takes over the brothel, acquiring the nickname that provides the film’s title—but she and Wolfram are destined to meet again.

Both the story and Stroheim’s approach to it were, in some ways, crowning realizations of themes—erotic obsession, imperial cruelty, and the rot behind aristocratic style—that he’d been developing throughout the decade. He displayed those ideas as much in the decorative forms of royal opulence and colonial decadence as in the drama of arrogance and licentiousness. What’s more, the tale, of steadfast purpose in the face of oppression and corruption, meshed with the story of his life—both the one that he told and the one that he actually lived.

Stroheim was no aristocrat; he was born Erich Stroheim, in 1885, in Vienna, to Jewish parents. (Richard Koszarski’s biography “Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim,” is a meticulously researched source.) A bad student destined for the family’s hat shop, Stroheim joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, in a subordinate transport outfit reserved for Jews, but was deemed unfit for duty. In 1909, he boarded a ship for the United States.

Upon arriving at Ellis Island, Stroheim reinvented himself, adding the aristocratic “von” to his name. His new life was anything but aristocratic: he went from job to job (including singing waiter); joined the National Guard, in New York, and apparently went AWOL (he told the French writer Bob Bergut, who published a biography of him in 1960, that he resented officers who “tried to make you clean their horse’s rectum”); and was sent on the road by a clothing firm. He turned up in San Francisco, in 1912, and wrote a play that he soon submitted to a film producer. He further embellished the fiction of his noble birth by claiming to be a decorated imperial officer. (He also claimed to be Catholic.) In 1914, he moved to Los Angeles while D. W. Griffith was shooting “The Birth of a Nation” and got work on it—apparently doing stunts, and also, Stroheim claimed, appearing in bit parts in blackface. He then worked as an extra, until his military experience got him hired as a horse wrangler on a movie. The First World War helped immensely: he became an assistant director and a consultant, thanks to his claimed expertise about the Austrian and German Armies, working on propaganda movies including Griffith’s “Hearts of the World” (1918). Meanwhile, Stroheim was getting ever more prominent acting roles, culminating in a part in another propaganda film, “The Heart of Humanity”—playing a German soldier, a rapist who throws his victim’s baby out a window—which made him instantly famous as a villain.

Yet, when the war ended, Stroheim was back to being an extra, so he took a gamble. “The Heart of Humanity” had been produced by Universal, which was founded and run by Carl Laemmle, a German Jewish émigré. Barging in on Laemmle at home, Stroheim pitched a story for a movie that he’d write, direct, and star in; Laemmle took a flier on him. That film, “Blind Husbands,” came out in 1919 and set the template for Stroheim’s career. Like much of “Queen Kelly” and all but one of Stroheim’s classic silents, “Blind Husbands” is centered on Europe’s upper crust—aristocrats, officers, royals—and their relationships with plebeians, including the American haute bourgeoisie. Stroheim himself plays the villain, one Lieutenant Eric von Steuben, who meets a vacationing American woman at an Alpine resort and tries to seduce her under the nose of her neglectful husband.

As Steuben, Stroheim assumed a military bearing and status that he’d never approached in his actual Army days. The performance style that he thereby invented set the mold for most of his future roles; it was a defining trait of his films, and it embodied the convergence of artifice and realism that defines the art of movies. Stroheim’s formality, rigidity, punctiliousness, and unctuousness would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the power that those traits symbolize—the alluring power of the sword-wielding, fiercely disciplined officer and the imperial power represented by the Army in which he serves. Stroheim’s turn as a dangerous seducer sexualizes this power—blending unrestrained desire with a sadistic pleasure in cruelty—as if providing, in his person, a moral X-ray of the imperial milieu that he had escaped.

Stroheim pushed his actors to the limit, doing countless takes, regardless of time and footage, until he achieved the desired effect. He also incurred expenses by changing the script in the course of the shoot and insisting on elaborate sets, rendering old Europe with a profusion of details that convey both a quasi-documentary authenticity and the psychological undertones of that milieu’s dark attraction. The resulting budget was much higher than Laemmle had planned, but there was no lasting discord, because “Blind Husbands” became a commercial and critical success. Stroheim was instantly hailed as an important new director, and Laemmle immediately hired him again. First, Stroheim wrote and directed (but did not act in) “The Devil’s Pass Key” (1920), a now lost film about an American playwright in Paris whose wife is targeted by blackmailers. Then, in 1922, came “Foolish Wives” a kind of a follow-up to his début, which turned out to be both an artistic landmark and a harbinger of production troubles to come.

The story of “Foolish Wives” hit riskily close to home, with a premise based on the sort of imposture that was part of Stroheim’s own self-presentation. He plays the so-called Count Sergius Karamzin, one of a trio of Russians who pose as aristocrats in Monte Carlo, seeking rich people to fleece. (Sergius, in addition, seeks women to seduce—or sexually assault.) Having picked a capital of luxury as his setting, Stroheim proceeded lavishly, expanding his fanaticism for detail, his cast of characters and extras, his vision of villainy, and, of course, his budget. “Foolish Wives” is colossal in its scope, with giant sets that included haughty villas, a vast casino, a majestic hotel, and a counterfeiter’s mucky neighborhood. Stroheim also insisted on an apparently unprecedented degree of physical realism, demanding, for his Café de Paris set, twelve-foot-high glass windows and a thirty-six-foot dome. Laemmle, footing the bill for these sumptuous methods, saw an opportunity to position Universal as a spare-no-expense enterprise, with a billboard in Times Square keeping boastful track of the ever-mounting budget.

Still, Stroheim’s spending was out of control—literally so, insofar as attempting to rein him in seemed to provoke new extravagances. When ordered to cut a location, he shot there nonetheless and charged the hotel bills to Universal. The studio’s newly hired production manager, Irving Thalberg, who was only twenty-one years old at the time, threatened to fire Stroheim as director—and Stroheim, in turn, threatened to quit as the star. Exasperated, Thalberg dispatched a team to reclaim the studio’s cameras and thus end the shoot. Stroheim had again generated vast amounts of footage; his first cut ran more than six hours and he proposed splitting it into two movies. Instead, Thalberg took over the editing, and Universal released “Foolish Wives” at a running time of not much more than two hours—and then, while it was in release, kept cutting it. (The exact durations of silent films were uncertain, owing to varying projection speeds.)

Even in Thalberg’s truncation, the movie is a masterwork, its overwhelming profusion of detail matched by the angular tension of Stroheim’s images. It depicts the seething furies of Old World traditions by means of a coruscating modernism. Its graphic clarity teems with ornament and glitter, visual intoxications that signal delusions and snares. The lustrous surfaces hide moral horrors, silence emotional terrors, and block out the filth beyond their boundaries. Stroheim is, above all, an olfactory director; his characters match lusts with scents—blossoms, garments, hay—and, long before Smell-O-Vision and Odorama, he made movies that stink. His characters obsessively perfume themselves, and his décor is filled with flowers that the characters use to distract themselves from the ambient odors of life, human or animal. In “Foolish Wives,” the ultimate stink is provided by a death scene involving a “burial” in a sewer.

For Stroheim, the palaces and playgrounds of the rich are elaborate concealments of the drudgery and the squalor underlying comforts and luxuries—and even the bare necessities of everyday people. His next film, “Merry-Go-Round,” set in Vienna, brings those two worlds together in the romance of a count and a working-class woman. This time, Stroheim (again working for Universal) didn’t act in the film—and, when he went over budget, he was simply fired, and Thalberg brought in other writers and another director. The movie survives, and some of Stroheim’s work, with its vision of brutality hiding in plain sight, is apparent in the finished product. The film was reviewed favorably and did well, but its prime legacy is the firing and replacement of Stroheim, which Hollywood insiders instantly understood as the moment that definitively solidified the studio system, subordinating directors to producers’ commercial demands and industrial methods.

Stroheim’s prime theme is masking and the fear of being unmasked. Many of his protagonists feign a noble pedigree, as he was doing in real life, and, when he plays actual noblemen, his own aristocratic pretense lends them an imprimatur of authenticity. His next film, “Greed,” is set in the United States and lacks any aristocratic element, but it’s nonetheless also a story of an assumed identity and the desperate price of unmasking. “Greed,” which was shot for nearly seven months in 1923, is Stroheim’s most famous and infamous film. It’s an adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” a harshly realistic parable about poverty and the corrupting power of money, set largely in San Francisco. Stroheim, who shot on location, delivers a grungy and grubby story, his fanatical eye for grim detail producing a portrait of ordinary misery that assumes symbolic force.

Norris’s archetypically American tale gave Stroheim an opportunity to build on his earlier depictions of Americans abroad as gullible and oblivious. The protagonist, McTeague (Gibson Gowland) is a scuffling American naïf, a California miner who, seeking better prospects, learns dentistry from an itinerant practitioner and, without any formal qualifications, starts a practice in San Francisco. He falls in love with Trina (ZaSu Pitts), the girlfriend of his best friend, Marcus Schouler. As McTeague and Trina’s romance flourishes, she wins five thousand dollars in a lottery; once the pair marries, she turns into a pathological miser, to the point of polishing coins in her hoard. Schouler, meanwhile, becomes increasingly resentful, less about losing Trina than about missing out on her winnings. He gets his revenge by reporting McTeague for practicing dentistry without a license.

The movie was initially produced by Goldwyn Pictures, which midway through the edit, was merged into a new company, soon renamed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or M-G-M, which had a new head of production—none other than Thalberg. Again, Stroheim presented a very long cut—in the nine-hour range—and found himself in a battle of wills with Thalberg. Stroheim, who was contractually required to deliver a cut of about three hours, recut the film to about five hours, but Thalberg insisted on a more drastic reduction, bringing it less than two-and-a-half hours, leaving Stroheim heartbroken at the mutilation of the movie he considered his masterwork. (The surviving version is this Thalberg cut; a 1999 reconstruction, running nearly four hours, expands the narrative by way of still photos and intertitles.) When the movie was released, in December, 1924, it was reviled by most critics for its ugly emotions and settings (but not by The New Yorker’s Theodore Shane, who put it on his ten-best list for 1925), and it flopped at the box-office. Decades later, “Greed” was revived and reclaimed as Stroheim’s consensus masterpiece, one of the glories of silent film, and one of the greatest of all movies. (In 1952, in polls by the Brussels Cinémathèque and by Sight and Sound, it was named as one of the ten best films ever made.)

Yet “Greed,” as it exists, is a curious paradox: despite being rooted in real locations and in Stroheim’s experience of hard times in San Francisco, it seems less personal than his best European-centered movies. For all the film’s lurid ambience and brutal action, there is something abstract about it, like the fulfillment of a literary conceit. (I’d contend that it owes its pride of place to critical prejudice in favor of social realism and to its harrowing ending, the two antagonists’ sun-parched fight in Death Valley.) Stroheim’s interest in McTeague feels merely theoretical. Poverty and struggle, as subjects, engage him only negatively, as things to avoid—as if his adopted, aristocratic identity precluded any identification with Norris’s working-class characters. Confronted with the characters’ lack of style, he stylizes them both too much and too little; his actors lack the martial demeanor and gestural snap of the ideal embodiment of his directorial aesthetic—that is, himself. The world of Norris’s novel is not Stroheim’s, however brilliantly he filmed it; his Europe-set movies, especially those in which he starred, exist in a world of his own. These movies, whether about real aristocrats or faux ones, were ultimately extensions of his inner life.

Moment by moment, none of the extant Stroheim films in which he doesn’t star are as inventive, thrilling, and multidimensional as the ones in which he does. His onscreen presence tautens his creation of images; his own repertory of mannerisms, expressions, and gestures is uniquely attuned to his cinematic universe. His next film, “The Merry Widow” (1925), a free dramatic adaptation of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta, is a prime example of what’s missing when he remains behind the camera. In the fictitious kingdom of Monteblanco, Prince Danilo (John Gilbert) falls in love with an American danseuse, Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray), and, at first, conceals his royal identity; they’re about to marry when the king orders him to give up the commoner. The results are melodramatic and violent: Stroheim’s lacerating approach to the subject turns its champagne fantasy into bracing and eye-opening bitters. Yet, despite Stroheim’s manifest revulsion at the snobbery and tyranny of blithering monarchs, his sumptuous and suggestive set pieces, and his canny closeups of Danilo (from Sally’s point of view) gazing into the camera, “The Merry Widow” hardly matches “Foolish Wives” in acridity and astonishment. During the production, Stroheim was both extravagant and cantankerous; although “The Merry Widow” was both a critical and financial hit, M-G-M, tired of conflict with him, released him from his contract.

It isn’t only in recent decades that independent productions have unleashed directorial inspiration. In 1926, Stroheim signed with the independent producer Pat Powers and made “The Wedding March,” his supreme masterwork. It shares the theme of “The Merry Widow”—the romance of a prince and a commoner—but now this outline bends to fit Stroheim’s unique physique and manner. The movie is set in Vienna, in June, 1914, just before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sets off the First World War, and Stroheim stars as Prince Nicholas, known as Nicki, a cavalry officer whose doddering father, Prince Ottokar, wants him to marry rich. Nicki, however, falls for the daughter of innkeepers, a woman named Mitzi (Fay Wray), whom he catches sight of when she is in a crowd watching a procession outside Vienna’s cathedral. He is on duty and she is surrounded by onlookers, and their flirtation, hemmed in by the crowd of spectators and the tight formation of mounted soldiers, yields the most elaborate sequence in Stroheim’s career: flickering glances, provocative gestures, furtive smiles, framed mainly in extreme closeup, together with an object of Stroheim’s olfactory fetish—a flower that, in Nicki’s winking enticement, hints at their erotic bond. It takes a violent accident—call it nature’s sadism—for the two to find each other again.

Erich von Stroheim and ZaSu Pitts in “The Wedding March,” 1928.Photograph courtesy Everett

Stroheim’s method rises to its apogee in evoking the couple’s earnest longing and graceful entwining. His style and substance, form and idea, fuse to spectacular yet intimate effect. He plays Nicki surprisingly, with an even gentler romantic manner than that of Gilbert in “The Merry Widow,” and gives Mitzi—portrayed by Wray in a performance that’s the finest of any actress in Stroheim’s œuvre—a serene romantic exaltation to match. The encounter amounts to a philosophical definition of nobility as something that owes nothing to titles or traditions. Inevitably, this natural nobility comes into tragic conflict with the order of official power and with the disorder of impoverished striving.

Once again, Stroheim delivered an exceptionally long cut and proposed splitting it into two films. Only after a disastrous preview of the combined version did his producer and distributor agree. When the first installment, “The Wedding March,” was released, Stroheim met with incomprehension from critics, and the film, despite doing decent business in New York, was a disaster in wide release. The extended editing process didn’t help; the film was shot in 1926 but wasn’t released until October, 1928, a year to the day after “The Jazz Singer” came out and launched talking pictures. The second part of “The Wedding March,” titled “The Honeymoon,” was never even shown in the U.S. A radically abbreviated version was released only in Europe and South America and subsequently lost.

And then came “Queen Kelly.” Stroheim’s career was more precarious than ever, but the prospect of another independent venture—with Swanson as producer, presumably backed by Kennedy’s riches—held out the prospect of salvation. The conflict that ultimately wrecked the project was about matters more fundamental than money or running time. Swanson, though surprised by Stroheim’s exacting direction, appreciated it and praised it. Onscreen, along with her precision, she seems equipped with an inner spotlight that projects personality energetically with every glimmer of expression. When the action rises in intensity, this gleam gathers quickly to a fiery glow of tragic power. (She also delivers some deft physical comedy.) Her problem was with the story and with Stroheim’s quest for physical realism.

In Stroheim’s post-“Greed” films, he’d put aside high-born predators and their naïve victims, replacing these stock characters with sincere lovers, aristocratic and common, whose bond defies and transcends the social order. In “Queen Kelly,” Wolfram and Kelly pay a high price for their defiance, and in Kelly’s case this price is the depravity she encounters in Dar es Salaam. The new restoration of the movie includes some surviving scenes that provide a taste of what Stroheim had in mind for this extended sequence of foul exoticism and bitter survivalism. (Indeed, had the shoot been completed, the Dar es Salaam segment would likely have been longer than the royal one.) His vision of colonialism is uncompromising: the colonizers import the ornamental forms of European society in order to unleash its cruel rapacity all the more freely. Swanson, despite having approved the script, didn’t like the African part when it came to shooting and when she saw the raw footage. She considered the section needlessly revolting, she disliked Stroheim’s hyperrealistic depiction of crude feelings, and she stormed off set when the actor playing Kelly’s vile husband spat tobacco juice onto her hand. The moment was in the script—but the reality was too much. Stroheim was fired, the script was rewritten, another director was hired, more footage was shot—and yet the movie was effectively abandoned. (A version of it that runs barely more than an hour and omits the African portion entirely was released in Paris, in 1932.)

Unable to find another directing job, Stroheim fell back on acting work. In 1932, he was hired to direct a low-budget talkie, “Walking Down Broadway,” based on a play by Dawn Powell, about the relationships of working-class women and men in New York. But the studio decided not to release the film and reshot much of it with other directors, issuing it under the title “Hello, Sister!” Some of Stroheim’s footage, its harsh physicality unmistakable, made it into the released version, but his directorial career was done, and he subsequently eked out a living in screenwriting and acting. But two iconic roles still lay ahead of him: Jean Renoir, who considered Stroheim “the greatest auteur of films in the history of cinema,” cast him in “Grand Illusion” (1937), as an aristocratic German officer in the First World War, and he got an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” (1950) as the butler of a silent-era star who is unable to accept that her reign is over. The actress is played by Swanson, and in a scene when her character rewatches one of her yesteryear triumphs Wilder uses a brief clip from “Queen Kelly.”

Stroheim’s startlingly intense and fiercely stylized performances in Renoir’s and Wilder’s modern classics prove that his acting retains its full force and flavor in talking pictures. The tantalizing traces of his work in “Hello, Sister!” suggest that his direction would have been no less original or distinctive with actors who speak. It’s as much of a marvel to contemplate his explosive beginnings, in 1919, within the studio system as to consider his soul destruction, by it, just a few years later. By the time he died, in 1957, at the age of seventy-one, he’d at least lived to see “Greed” celebrated and to reissue “The Wedding March” to acclaim. His greatness is justly canonical. Yet, because of all the studio tinkering and trimming of his films, and the accidental losses and intentional destruction of prints, negatives, and outtakes, Stroheim’s art remains, in significant measure, unknown and unknowable. Though his films are startlingly personal and his life story is well researched, he remains a filmmaker of mystery. ♦