The Merry Widow

Based on an operetta by Franz Lehar, The Merry Widow is Erich von Stroheim working in a similar space as his contemporary Ernst Lubitsch (who made his own version of the same story nine years later). von Stroheim doesn’t have the same light touch as Lubitsch, but he was a graceful, detailed, and ornate filmmaker who tried for deeper emotions. The material isn’t the same kind of source of deep emotions as something like the novel McTeague that inspired von Stroheim’s Greed, but the director d...