Foolish Wives (1922)

According to the Universal's press department, the picture cost $1,103,736.38; was 11 months and six days in filming; six months in assembling and editing; consumed 320,000 feet of negative, and employed as many as 15,000 extras for atmosphere. [...]

Advertised, reluctantly, by Universal as the "First Million Dollar Movie," Erich Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives became one of the greatest debacles of the silent era. Given more or less a free hand by Universal founder Carl Laemmle, who certainly should have known better, Von Stroheim went about recreating famously faithful copies of Monte Carlo, both on the studio back-lot and on location near Monterey, California. [...]

The first full-scale working-out of Stroheim's explorations of the ground between high society manners and terminal squalor and depravity. The plot centres on the sexual and criminal activities of Count Karamzin (Stroheim). [...]