baderfan A suspenseful struggle between devotion & betrayal, forgiveness & revenge, lust & love in the time when dailiness made a wide path for the immoral men, lurking the married women on the pretext of saving them from the misery of their inadequate marriages. In the meantime,the devotion of a woman to her husband despite her dissatisfaction, astonished an ill-sighted lieutenant, as well as her own over-occupied physician husband; in a way that such a devotion and persistence couldn't be realized by him until after the men reached at the inaccessible peak of the mountain of struggles; said to have one way up, but many ways down.In the end, reconciliation is the only reasonable answer of the husband to the helpless fellow mountaineer, to his loving wife and also to himself./ B+

Michael_Elliott Blind Husbands (1919) ** 1/2 (out of 4) A doctor (Sam DeGrasse) and his wife (Francelia Billington) travel to the Dolemites in Northern Italy where their rocky marriage shows. The doctor pays very little attention to his beautiful wife, which an Austrian military officer (Erich von Stroheim) notices and decides to try and seduce her. After viewing this film I must admit that I was rather shocked about all the positive reviews it has received over the past several decades. Apparently the film was very popular when it was first released, which is shocking too because I found the film to be way too simple. Half way through I really started to think I was watching a film by D.W. Griffith due to how simple the story structure was. It's pretty simple as we have a lazy husband, a bored wife and a jerk who wants her. There's no problem in keeping all of this simple but the issue I had with the entire film is that I found all the characters to be under-written. We never learn why the doctor is so uninterested in his wife. We never learn why the wife puts up with it. She never mentions anything to the husband and instead just sits back doing nothing. We get a few hints at the type of person the military officer is but von Stroheim's story really doesn't give him too many details either. This type of simple storytelling can be effective but I found a lot of the 91-minutes here just to wonder on without anything either going for them or the scenes just leading to no where. Many of them just run on and on for no apparent reason so perhaps a good ten-minutes edited out would have helped the flow of the film. The issues with the story are the main problem and the rest is pretty good. The performances by the three leads make the film worth viewing and of course von Stroheim stands out as the creepy. You can tell he's having a good time playing this jerk and it looks rather effortless so perhaps he's just playing himself. The opening credits explain the situation of the film and it's written as if the director was trying to explain himself to many husbands out there. I found Billington to be extremely effective as well as she does a very good job at showing the character's boredom without going over the top. Another plus is the vision of the director as each scene has a very nice look and the cinematography really packs a nice punch. BLIND HUSBANDS is far from a bad movie but at the same time I just didn't think there was enough here to make it a classic or something that is a must see.

electricsheep-1 A basic marital morality tale, enthused with Stroheim's lust for self-loathing. He plays an over-sexed, effete, lizard of a Prussian Officer, named Von Steubens, who zealously seeks to dishonour the wife of an American doctor holidaying in an Alpine retreat.Interestingly, Stroheim is said to have virtually stalked Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, in order to get his story, The Pinnacle, made into what would become Blind Husbands. Not the least hint or sign, then, of the crazy, obsessive auteur, a part that Stroheim would pioneer! As a director, Stroheim does have a wonderful visual eye (scenes of men climbing mountains etc.). There are also some very inventive shots, such as when the wife is looking at her practically impotent husband, the doctor, sleeping in bed, via a mirror, and then sees a young couple at the lodge in place of him, completely in love, before going back to the snoring doctor.Moreover, the English actor who would go on to play McTeague in Stroheim's much greater, later, work: Greed, here plays a mountain guide. He is a symbol of the people of the mountains, strong, pious and devout, a complete opposite to Von Steubens' decadent Officer, who uses his cultural refinement only to guarantee his baser purposes, wooing the local peasant girls with poetry for instance, and wooing the doctor's wife with a violin.But that's the problem with film. Although the characterisation isn't completely two-dimensional, the esteemed doctor, for instance, shows envy and hatred. His wife also admits an ambivalent interest in Von Steubens unwholesome charm. But Stroheim seems to idealise these mountain people from the get go, which is stupid romanticism. Anyone who has such romanticism should read An Alpine Idyll, a short story by Hemingway.Still, an interesting early Stroheim.

wmorrow59 Erich Von Stroheim's first film as writer/director stands as one of his most satisfying works. Not so coincidentally, it is one of only two films he directed that was left largely intact by the 'Front Office' executives of his studio, Universal, at least on its initial release. (The other would be his 1925 version of The Merry Widow, made for MGM.) Surviving prints of Blind Husbands lack some material cut for a 1924 reissue but are otherwise substantially complete. After this successful debut Von Stroheim's productions became more elaborate, his off-camera behavior more outrageous, and his relationships with studio chiefs and money men behind the scenes more contentious, almost always resulting in the films being taken out of his hands and re-edited by others. (The movie career of Orson Welles would follow a sadly similar trajectory.) But the trouble and notoriety came later. In 1919 Erich Von Stroheim was still a little known character actor noted for playing sadistic Huns in war movies, and this maiden effort as screenwriter, director and star took Hollywood by surprise.In comparison with Von Stroheim's later, more elaborate, and often bizarre works, Blind Husbands is simple and straightforward. The story concerns an unhappy romantic triangle involving an upper class American couple, Dr. Robert Armstrong and his wife Margaret, and a Lieutenant Eric Von Steuben, whom they encounter while vacationing at a resort in the Austrian Alps. The tension between the three is apparent from the beginning, as they share a carriage ride uphill to the resort. The husband is inattentive to his wife; she is frustrated; and the lieutenant, having quickly analyzed the situation -- and Margaret's legs -- begins a determined campaign to seduce her away from her seemingly indifferent husband. This opening sequence gives us the essence of the plot in a matter of moments, primarily through visuals instead of wordy title cards.We soon learn that Lieutenant Von Steuben has other irons in the fire, so to speak: he is a 'serial seducer' with a number of lady friends at the resort, including a frumpy middle-aged chambermaid and a young local girl who pathetically takes his protestations of love at face value. Dr. Armstrong, on the other hand, treats his wife coldly, and the only clue we're given as to why this is so comes when he cheerfully holds a villager's baby -- then shoots a significant look of unhappiness at his wife, who is shopping and doesn't notice. Clearly, this man wants to have a child, and his wife is either unwilling or unable to accommodate him. We have to assume that the former is the case, because as the story develops we learn that although the doctor is something of a cold fish he is also a basically decent guy, and not someone who would resent his wife for a medical condition beyond her control. Margaret appears to be considerably younger than her husband, and presumably doesn't feel ready to settle down to child-rearing.Whatever the reasons for the friction in the Armstrong marriage, the plot turns on Margaret's response to Lieutenant Von Steuben's brazen advances; this is the crux of the film and what makes it worth watching today. Viewers unaccustomed to silent drama might expect a great deal of arm-waving, eyebrow-waggling, and other histrionics associated (with some justification) with the early days of cinema, but here is where Blind Husbands made its mark in 1919, and why it's still surprisingly watchable today: director Von Stroheim, a one-time assistant to D.W. Griffith, inspired his actors to give intensely felt yet remarkably restrained performances which for latter-day viewers might suggest Ingmar Bergman's ensemble company, or, more specifically where this material is concerned, the triangle at the center of Roman Polanski's A Knife in the Water. Thanks especially to the understated work of Francellia Billington as Margaret Armstrong, a great deal of information is conveyed with glances, shrugs, half-smiles, and frowns; no arm waving is necessary. It is clear to the viewer that Margaret is startled and then flattered by the lieutenant's audacity, at least at first, but also that she soon feels he has overstepped his bounds and is more upset than pleased about the situation. Von Stroheim's own performance as (his alter ego?) Von Steuben is highly enjoyable and set the standard for some of his later screen scoundrels, although the character is rather limited in scope in this early incarnation. Also notable in a sympathetic supporting role is Gibson Gowland, who would later embody the dentist MacTeague in Von Stroheim's masterpiece Greed.The plotting of Blind Husbands turns hokey at the climax, when the doctor confronts his rival face-to-face on a mountain top. (The original title of the screenplay was "The Pinnacle.") There is some melodramatic hokum over a letter Margaret wrote to Von Steuben, but after all that understatement a little melodrama is forgivable -- and, frankly, rather fun.An earlier posting concerning this film suggests it's a comedy, which it's not, but there are nice comic touches throughout. I first saw it at a museum screening a long time ago, and still remember the laughter when Von Steuben approaches two different women at a party and uses the same pick-up line, verbatim, on each of them. That device is still amusing today. And this movie stands as one of Erich Von Stroheim's strongest achievements in his all-too-brief, star-crossed career as a filmmaker.