My first film from the self-titled Man You Love to Hate, The Wedding March is a gloriously lavish, painfully incomplete vanity project, which sees Erich von Stroheim showcase an astonishing portrait of decadent Imperial Austria with extravagance and wickedly ironic melodrama. Given von Stroheim's uncompromising attitude to filmmaking means that none of his films ever released exactly how he wanted and it's no different here, vastly over budget, vastly behind schedule and vastly self-indulgent, including the use of thousands of litres of real champagne and locking his cast on a sealed set to shoot an orgy... Silent film directors are insane. It's tragic to remember that even with everything going for The Wedding March, it's barely one-third of von Stroheim's original vision, as the majority of his original edit was massively truncated and the second half of the film he shot, The Honeymoon, is now lost to time. That alone is painfully frustrating. The Wedding March is not the masterpiece it could have been but stands as a testament to Erich von Stroheim's incredible filmmaking talent to this day.
Review of The Wedding March
