In his first film, Erich von Stroheim invested a typical love triangle with a wealth of significant, often bizarre details, and the result is penetrating and memorable melodrama. Von Stroheim cast himself as the predatory Austrian lieutenant who becomes the love object of the neglected wife of an American surgeon on vacation in the Austrian Alps. Eileen Bowser of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, writes, “Though his skill in the use of the camera shows the results of his education under Griffith, the films made by Stroheim are very different from those of his mentor. The world he portrays is both harsher and more sophisticated. In Blind Husbands, not one of the three main characters is wholly virtuous, and from the beginning there is a sense of impending doom.... Above all, Stroheim has a keen sense of irony. The wife's hair shines with a typically Griffith halo of backlighting, symbol of virtue, at the moment when she is considering infidelity.... The hints at sexual aberrations that are a recurring motif in the Stroheim films begin here also: the mixture of religious symbols with illicit sex...fetishism...voyeurism.... None of this is adventitious...(Stroheim)'s main contribution to the art of the motion picture resulted from his exploration of the multiple layers of reality, his discovery that the camera can reveal ‘the underside of the truth.'”