The Wedding March

The Wedding March (1928)

Dashing, Impetuous, Insolent. the playboy of Vienna- handsome, well-born, idol of the ladies- Prince Nicki, portrayed by Erich Von Stroheim. Riotous, color-splashed romance of Vienna.

Against the backdrop of Vienna's hidebound caste system, aristocrat and army officer Nicki is attracted to peasant Mitzi, although he knows it cannot last. Acquiescing to familial pressure, he ultimately gives her up to marry the more socially acceptable – albeit crippled – heiress Cecelia. Mitzi, for her part, is heartbroken and must resign herself to marrying churlish butcher Schani Eberle.

Date of release
1928-10-06
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (44)
Runtime
1h 49m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Erich von Stroheim
Collection
Prince Nicki Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

The Wedding March is a 1928 American synchronized sound romantic drama film written and directed by Erich von Stroheim. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. The film stars Erich von Stroheim, Fay Wray and ZaSu Pitts. Paramount Pictures forced von Stroheim to create two films from the footage, the second being The Honeymoon. The Honeymoon is now considered lost, the only known copy destroyed in a fire in France in 1959.

Production

Shortly after completing The Merry Widow and having had a bad working experience at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Stroheim met independent film producer Pat Powers and convinced Powers to finance The Wedding March. Stroheim's script was completed by March 1926 and was 154 pages long. The currently available version of the film depicts the first 67 pages of the original script.

As was often the case with films directed by Stroheim, the film's accuracy resulted in high expenses and production values. Stroheim rebuilt huge sets for St. Stephen's Cathedral, the streets surrounding it, various palatial rooms and an entire apple orchard with thousands of blossoms individually tied to the trees.

Shooting began in June 1926 and lasted until Stroheim was finally shut down by Powers in January 1927. A reporter allowed onto the film's set reported Stroheim's perfectionism and indifference to time and money, and stated that Stroheim once told his cast and crew that if necessary they would film 24,000 takes of a scene until they got it right. Over the six months of filming, Stroheim shot over 200,000 feet of film.

In January 1927, Stroheim screened the footage for Powers and began to edit the film, wanting to release two separate films to be shown on consecutive nights. His initial cut of part 1 was 25,795 feet long (a little over four-and-a-half hours), after which he refused to cut the film further. Powers took control of the film.

The Wedding March was previewed at the Egyptian Theater in Long Beach, California the following March. After the disastrous preview, Paramount decided to release The Wedding March as two films after all, with part two being re-titled The Honeymoon. The Wedding March was 14 reels long and The Honeymoon was eight reels long. The first three reels of The Honeymoon was footage from The Wedding March that was used as exposition.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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