Customer Reviews

Blind Husbands / The Great Gabbo

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This excellent DVD features a wonderful silent film from 1919 and one of the first Hollywood musicals from 1929, when "talkies" were introduced, and although I was expecting two silent films, I was not one bit disappointed. Knowing next to nothing about Erich von Stroheim (except that I had to see some of his work one day!) I watched and enjoyed both films without any expectations or preconceived ideas, and simply cannot fault either film.
Blind Husbands is visually lovely, the music is perfectly suited, and it is a poignant story with the morale that it's not always "the other man" who is solely to blame in marriage difficulties. It moves along at a comfortable pace as it unfolds and shows the emotions of each character just at the right moment. It's impressive that von Stroheim wrote and directed, as well as played a lead role. As an actor he comes across subtly yet strongly in this film, and overall I rate this film as a top quality silent movie.
The Great Gabbo is a Talkie and shows that von Stroheim was also very competent in speech, playing a very difficult and troubled showman; a ventriloquist, whose dummy almost steals the show. The dummy dialogues and scenes are superb and delightful, balancing the negative and rough character played by Stroheim. Then the musical really gets going; visually surprising, intriguing and fascinating, with very high quality music and songs as good as any famous Hollywood musical since (and personally, I enjoyed this one more than many others musicals) The picture quality is extremely good, being in pristine black and white, and while the sound might sound a bit tinny to sensitive ears, I still think it's a superior work of remastering. While the music and dummy entertain us, a very moving love story also unfolds, leaving the viewer feeling very satisfied after both of these memorable movies.
The DVD also has some interesting special features; photos, interviews and other snippets, including two recipes by Stroheim such as Almond Strudel which sounds worth a try! Definitely a worthwhile DVD - thanks, Kino Video!

Even thought the Great Gabbo is supposedly restored the famous color sequence is in black and white.

This is the best restoration of these two titles likely ever to be seen and I'm very grateful for what is left of these films. Blind Husbands is great and The Great Gabbo is absolutely fascinating. I could listen to Von Stroheim's voice for hours. I don't know if Blind Husbands had an End title, but if it did, the use of an End title with a 2003 copyright is infuriating.

It is odd that 1929's "Great Gabbo" was a commercial flop during that year. Actually it stands up as one of the better and weirder films of that first year of talking pictures. It stars Erich Von Stroheim as an egomaniac ventriloquist, Gabbo, that has endowed his mannequin, Otto, with all of his good qualities. He has a live-in girlfriend, Mary, whom he verbally abuses until she leaves him. Two years later finds Gabbo a great success and the headliner of a Manhattan revue. However, now Gabbo is regretting his break-up with Mary and wants her back. He thinks he sees an opportunity when Mary shows up in the chorus in the same show as Gabbo. Besides the unusual storyline this film has some of the odder musical numbers you'll ever see, including a number in which the stars, dressed as spiders, throw each other around on stage while having a lovers' quarrel. Sadly, the technicolor scenes from this film are gone forever, but the restored version of this film is excellent and highly recommended.

"Blind Husbands" is a film in which Von Stroheim both directed and acted. The story seems somewhat routine now, but was considered racy for its day. It concerns a rather bland American doctor and his neglected wife on vacation in the Alps who cross paths with Lieutenant Erich Von Steuben (Von Stroheim), a military man with an eye for the ladies. He pursues the doctor's wife while the doctor is preoccupied with climbing the local mountains. Its main features are that the characters are well-developed compared with other films of the 1910's and also that the running time is a mere 90 minutes compared with later Von Stroheim efforts where he wound up going wild and shooting hours of film.

The following are the extra features. Kino has always been known for sideways attempts at extra features, and this disc is no exception. However, they are still quite interesting if you take the time to go through them.

Excerpts from the original Blind Husbands pressbook;
Audio clips of Valerie Von Stroheim and Paul Kohner - This is odd that this is in audio form only because in fact these are audio excerpts from the documentary "The Man You Love to Hate" which is on the "Foolish Wives" DVD.
Dossier on the ill-fated 1929 remake of Blind Husbands;
"The High Command," a 1944 radio broadcast;
A note on The Great Gabbo by Erich Von Stroheim - Here Von Stroheim expresses his regret that people thought that the direction was really his and not James Cruze. Cruze was one of Von Stroheim's friends and apparently this accusation hurt Cruze quite deeply.
Photo gallery;
Published Works: A Brief Survey - Von Stroheim was the author and coauthor of quite a few books.
Portrait gallery

In the introductory lines, we may realize what the real intention the story. We use to blame the presence of "the other" as responsible of the breakthrough of most of couples but frequently we tend to forget the behavior of the husband when, the quotidian state of things and the very fact they are married would seem to confer them of a sort of Corsican's patent around the main object; the preservation of what once was their most legitimate desire the love of the conquered woman. Such is the case that we have when an North American couple decides to rest and spent several days in the surroundings of Monte Castello, in this trip they will meet an Austrian Cavalry's Officer Von Stebein (magisterially performed by Stroheim) and we will witness some little proofs of attention, kindness of Dr. smith with his wife which guarantee this ruthless Officer who only enjoys three things in the life, wine WOMEN and songs (in a visible parody to the famous polka of Johan Strauss (Wine, women and songs).

"Blind husbands" might be labeled as ethic fable, an opportune warning and an uninterested advise, but furthermore stands out as another emblematic classic of this genius of the cinematography as Erich Stroheim indeed was.

His narrative style of was always spiced of common situations that eventually increase in its dramatic feature and become delirious stories and outrageous landscapes, double senses occurrences, in which the caustic and acidic gaze is always surrounding the script as a true entomologist. Stroheim influenced over a very young and promising director who was born with the Century: Luis BunueL (Note for instance the initial visual contact among him and Mr. Smith `s wife and how the lens focuses on her feet (the same device employed by Buñuel in El in the church years after)

Stroheim would seem to warn us the love is a beauty flower, that daily needs to be irrigated to avoid it fades. But the way he links and narrates the whole metaphor is so radiant, overwhelming and mesmerizing that captures our immediate attention from the same beginning of projection..

It's useless to tell how I love this movie, a true gem and one of the most reminded films ever made.

The two films on this disc are both historic milestones in von Stroheim's career, though I personally found them more of historic interest than the stuff of classic films or extraordinarly captivating entertainment. 'Blind Husbands' (1919) wasn't the first film he ever acted in, but it was the first film he directed. Most people associate him with epic-length extravaganzas, but this film is only a bit over an hour long. Simply told, it's the story of a wife who goes astray while she and her husband are on vacation, although contrary to the average film of this time, it's not because she's some evil or morally deficient woman or even the other man's fault (even though in this story he is a notorious seducer of women), but rather because her husband doesn't pay enough attention to her or show her he loves her, quite taking her and her love for granted. However, I personally didn't feel that connected to the characters, and wished they had been given some more development. I also wished the plot could have been fleshed out a little more instead of things more or less just happening right away. It also doesn't help matters that in 1919, a lot of these things could only be hinted at or shown as much tamer than they'd be today; for example, we never even see Margaret and von Steuben in bed together or see a real indication of a hot and heavy affair. That aspect does make it kind of dated, since the 1919 definition of an affair or its depiction on the screen is far, far different from the one the average person has today, to say the least. However, things do start picking up when Margaret's husband and Lt. von Steuben climb to the top of the mountain and have their confrontation.

'The Great Gabbo' (1929) was von Stroheim's first talkie, and is about as interesting as most talkies from 1929. The camera is so static, the action is so stilted, and the actors are chattering almost nonstop, as though overcompensating for the fact that movies now had sound. It is so true that moviemaking took a huge step backwards in time when sound came in, and took a number of years to get back to the level it had been at in the late Twenties. Sure most of these very early talkies made a lot of money, but because people would pay money to see anything with sound in it, whether or not most of these films have aged well. How many 1929 talkies are still considered classics today, let alone even worthwhile? The only one I can think of off of the top of my head is 'The Cocoanuts,' and even that isn't without some bugs. 'The Great Gabbo' itself is also bogged down by a numer of lame song and dance numbers (musicals were also really popular in the early talkie era). I didn't really feel connected to any of the characters, and the plot is also clunky and dragged out. Even the presence of von Stroheim can't save this rather boring turkey. The storyline about a ventriloquist who is left by his girlfriend and then becomes obsessed with his dummy had a lot of potential, though, and it could actually have been a halfway decent film, at least, had it been made as a silent or later on in the sound era, when most of the kinks had gotten a chance to be ironed out and movies no longer looked and sounded so horribly stilted and stage-like as opposed to being actual "motion pictures."

There are also numerous great extras, such as an episode from a radio program von Stroheim did during WWII, two of his favorite recipes, press materials, a photo gallery, personal memos from him, audio interviews, information on the attempted sound remake of 'Blind Husbands,' and a summary of the books von Stroheim published.

Overall, it's not something I'd recommend to the average person unfamiliar with silent films in general or von Stroheim's career in particular, but it does have high historic importance that certainly would interest someone more familiar with these subjects.