Perfect cast and a good story

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

"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.

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+

I saw this "Mr Magorium's Wonderful Emporium" because I think this was the first to construct a story with the primary intent of creating a character for an actor. In this case the actor is the writer and director. He's a slight Jewish kid with poor education and working class background. For the international movie industry, he created an extremely well articulated story about himself as an Austrian nobleman, with bearing and art in the blood. He did so by extreme consistency in lies throughout his life, but he introduced himself, using films as the main truth. This is the first.The story is simple: he is traveling with a renown doctor and his supposedly beautiful wife to the Alps. While the doctor is away, he seduces the wife. The doctor confronts him on the mountain and he dies. It is told primitively: von Stroheim was for all his own story never a good storyteller. The mountains are significant of course, being something that references and defines the majesty of the Germanic soul. They would be exploited later in the service of Nazi identity, using much the same technique of imposing the unreal of the ideal on the real.Does it matter that he created this life for himself. It does for me, because I consider "Sunset Blvd." a touchstone and his placement in it an act of genius.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This is really a bookend with "Foolish Wives" for me. The later film was perhaps more melodramatic but they both share the Euro-womanizer and gullible wife angle. In "Husbands," Stroheim casts himself unsympathetically (and rather courageously, if you think about it) and seems to relish the villainy and cowardice of the role. The cast is excellent with particular credit due the off-balance wife for her uncomfortable acceptance of the Leutenant's attention.Stroheim's strength as a director always pivoted on his ability to move a story forward, however, and that's the very quality that makes this film work; one is always interested to follow along and see what happens.It's a real shame that the world of cinema was denied the complete development of Stroheim's directorial skills as it would have been fascinating to see how he developed full-formed in the sound era.