Foolish Wives (1922)

No Quote for this film.

A Super Jewel Production. Universal, not owning a proprietary theater chain, devised a 3-tiered branding system in order to market its feature product to independent theater owners: Red Feather (low budget programmers), Bluebird (mainstream releases) and Jewel (prestige pictures produced to draw higher roadshow ticket prices). At $1.104 million, this production was so costly that the studio wanted to differentiate it from even it's Jewel releases, branding this a "Super" Jewel, ensuring it special promotion and premium admission prices. Although the film made a nice profit, Erich von Stroheim (acting as producer as well as director) was rapidly becoming unemployable due to his flagrant excesses which enraged Carl Laemmle.
Included among the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die', edited by Steven Jay Schneider.
After six months in the editing room, Erich von Stroheim turned over his cut of the film to Universal Pictures in December of 1921. The film was 32 reels and 8 hours long, but von Stroheim insisted it was now "a perfect story." When asked how it would be possible to present 32 reels for an evening's entertainment, he replied, "That's a detail I hadn't time to bother about" (the magazine "Photoplay" suggested that the movie should be re-titled, "Foolish Directors," and released as a serial). Universal took over the movie, and edited it down to 14 reels, with a 210-minute running time. Von Stroheim hated the shorter version, complaining that all that was left of his masterpiece was "the bones."
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