USA 1922 | Director, Script: Erich von Stroheim | Cast: Erich von Stroheim, Miss Dupont, Maud George, Mae Busch | Production: Irving Thalberg | b/w | DCP | 142 min | silent | amer. INT | Lobster Films

Stroheim played a tsarist officer who lives in Monte Carlo with not one, but two, women, his “cousins”, and spends the money of people who, despite earning hand over fist, don’t know how to live. Karamzin goes after every woman, indiscriminately, be it his housemaid or the wife of the American ambassador. He does it to get money out of them – but he also just finds it fun. He even seduces a feebly minded minor. Whose father then kills him and stuffs him down a manhole in his beautiful white uniform – like Elagabalus, the Roman emperor, cut down to size by his guard, his limbs trimmed and shoved down the sewers, after he too, through his immoral carrying on, had made a mockery of Rome. He too could not decide whether to be a man or a woman. (Frieda Grafe, Süddeutsche Zeitung 1973)