Hollywood’s First Million-Dollar Movie
Mar 31, 2020
4 minutes
By DENNIS HARVEY
California has always been the land of personal reinvention. Few, however, have taken that notion as seriously as Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim. After emigrating from Europe in 1909, he rose to become a fabled Hollywood director and actor while claiming to be a scion of Austrian nobility and a decorated war hero, among other trifles.
Submitting to mere “Erich von Stroheim” for simplicity’s sake, he was, in fact, the son of a Jewish haberdasher, rejected by the Austrian army as unfit, an émigré precisely because his chances of advancement in class-conscious Vienna
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