Much like La Roue, this film is also very poignant, striking, and bold in the storyline. It’s about family troubles like many of the films coming from this era. That fact says a great deal about the enduring allure of family problems to audiences everywhere, later in the 30’s we’ll be saturated with love stories and romance problems, husbands and wives cheating. But the films of the 20’s unlike the 30’s shine a very blunt harsh lens on the true nature and problems of humanity. The family problems are real problems; abuse, murder, rape, blackmail, theft, direct crime. In the 30’s we see these problems get watered down through the romantic comedy angle, and showing off wealthy people.
There is something to be said about how the great depression arrived between the stark realism of the twenties, even though the economy was booming, and the escapsist films of the 30s that show wealthy people’s lives at a time when everyone is poor.
You could gather, and it is highly stated, that the filmmakers of the 30s actively avoided depressing their viewers because their lives were already depressed, their job was to cheer them up and offer them an escape from their lives outside the theater.
In the 20’s, people were just putting onscreen what was around them, as the medium was so new thus the storylines would be a little more brutal and shocking because the 30’s also brought with it political, and cultural change.
Von Stroheim actively claimed that he wanted to put onscreen material that was the lives of everyone, all the issues we deal with as humans. If there ever was a picture to summarize the boldness of the storylines in the 1920’s this is it.
The stylistic use of deep-focus and lighting and close up shots to emphasize the themes present behind the images only amplify the role of this movie in pushing the medium forward towards the concept of a camera that is a fly on a wall capturing brutal reality for the audience to witness.