#594 Erich von Stroheim

Thirty years on from the premiere
of The Merry Widow, a silent movie
directed by Erich von Stroheim,
come these two caricatures. One
is a take on the roles he played in
films after being a director was
made too difficult for him. The
other an invitation to the anniver-
sary of that first showing of the
only movie of his that could be
considered a box office success.


Left like that, it seems a compact
story spread over three decades.
Left like that, it leaves so much
out. Time is a series of triggers &
outcomes; but an outcome can
also be a trigger. The first trigger
in this sequence is Attaché d'am-
bassade, (Embassy Attaché), a com-
edy written in 1861 by Henri
Meilhac, an opera librettist &
playwright. The outcome, some
44 years later, is an operetta, Die
lustige Witwe, with the music by
Franz Lehár & a libretto based on
Meilhac's play. & that, in turn, is
not just the trigger for von Stro-
heim's film & six later versions
by various directors but also an
earlier one made in Hungary by
Mihály Kertész who later moved
to the U.S., changed his name to
Michael Curtiz, & made films as
diverse as Captain Blood, Casa-
blanca, & Yankee Doodle Dandy.


From those outcomes spread many
branch lines of varying length &
importance. Amongst the uncredited
extras in von Stroheim's movie were
Joan Crawford & Clark Gable. von
Stroheim's acting career included an
Oscar nomination for his performance
in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard,  The
castle tower that protrudes from the
bald skull of von Stroheim in Magritte's
Hommage is reprised as a unicorn's horn
in a number of paintings. & so it goes on,
present company hopefully included.

#593 Le Paysage de Baucis

I have discovered how to paint the emptiness between a hat 
& a man’s suit without suggesting ‘the invisible man.’ 
— René Magritte, letter to André Bosmans, 19 February 1966
Let's face it, the face isn't
there. Well, not completely.
The major aspects — eyes,
nose, lips — proportionate,
in place, posed & poised 
between a starched collar & 
a hat — no, not the usual 
bowler but a fedora this 
time around. Nothing there
to suggest the mythic con-
nection that the title implies
except perhaps disguise. Un-
less the emptiness of the suit
might be intended to conjure 
up the image of a landscape 
after a major flood has swept 
everything away. Which may
be a way to bring the myth be-
hind the title into the picture, 
though it won't be included in
this poem. Instead, a reference: 
Ovid, The Methamorphoses, Book
VIII, lines 611 through to 724.

#592 The Endless Chain

There is a serious motif to 
this piece — three men from
different eras on one horse
underlining the linear con-
tinuity of passing time & 
how similar things recur at 
intervals — but I find myself 
sidetracked thinking of the 
endless chain of variations 
that the passage of time has 
brought to that nursery rhyme 
with the opening line: Ride a 
cock-horse to Banbury Cross.