Politics & Power Quote by Erich von Stroheim

Guilt here isn’t private; it’s mass-produced, projected back at the artist in an imagined stadium of judgment. Von Stroheim frames his post-Foolish Wives life as a kind of moral perp-walk, moving through “vast crowds” whose faces are “white” and “American,” turned toward him in “stern reproof.” The phrasing is melodramatic on purpose, but the melodrama does real work: it captures the specific pressure of early Hollywood, where scandal, money, and respectability were already locked in a tight embrace.

Foolish Wives (1922) was notorious for its decadence and its budget excess, a movie sold on sin and extravagance even as studios began tightening control. Von Stroheim had built a persona as the aristocratic corrupter, a European agent of depravity in American fantasies. This quote flips that image: the seducer becomes the one being watched. “Seemed to walk” hints that the crowd may be partly real (press, moral reformers, studio brass) and partly psychological. Either way, he’s describing an America that consumes transgression and then punishes the person who staged it.

The sharpest subtext is in “white American faces.” It’s not just “the public”; it’s a particular majority, an insistently “clean” national self-image staring down the immigrant artist who made their appetites visible. Von Stroheim isn’t apologizing so much as diagnosing the bargain: America will pay for your wickedness, then demand you carry the shame for it.