Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922)

The mark of genius is an obsession with irrelevant detail.
Andrew Sarris, writing about Stroheim.

The essential contradictions in Stroheim's work:  between melodrama and naturalism; romanticism and cynicism; psychological detail and epic perspectives.
--David Thomson

Stroheim is gradually being forgotten.  Even the truncated Greed (1925) does not make the lists of greatest films as it once did, though TCM has shown a reconstructed four-hour version, using stills.  None of Stroheim's films survive as anything other than a pale shadow of their original versions, those that survive at all.  Two hours of the original six-hour Foolish Wives survive, even though Stroheim made himself the star in hopes of keeping the complete footage; Universal did not replace Stroheim, they just chopped up his film -- what remains is magnificent, with Monte Carlo built in California in exquisite detail. Stroheim plays a con man masquerading as Count Karamazin, offering European sophistication to American wives, especially the wife of the American ambassador, whom he attempts to seduce in order to con her out of money.  When he fails at this seduction he seduces the mentally-challenged daughter of his counterfeiter, who kills Karamazin and throws him into the sewer.

Stroheim was strongly influenced by D.W. Griffith, with whom had worked as assistant director, actor and military consultant (Stroheim had a brief career in the Austro-Hungarian army before leaving for America. fleeing creditors).  In Foolish Wives one can see the Griffith influence in the use of nature (Karamazin gets caught in a storm with the ambassador's wife) as well as the complex cross-cutting when fire engines are rushing to put out a fire.  Foolish Wives also reminds one of Chaplin, with both Chaplin and Stroheim dominating the frame, with minimal camera movement.  Unfortunately Stroheim did not have the business sense of Chaplin who, unlike Stroheim, used his own money to finance his films and thereby retained control of them.  Stroheim's last film as a director was in 1932, though most of the footage he shot was eliminated in the final film.  After that he worked fairly regularly as an actor, most notably in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1936) and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950).