Here the enemies of love are a powerful triumvirate-the church, the military, and marriage-all linked in a brilliant visual iconography. Stroheim and Fay Wray furtively pursue l'amour under the feet of a crucifix (which he salutes, military fashion); and in the shadow of a hulking, soulless icon of war, the "Iron Man." The hands playing the Wedding March become skeleton's hands. Stroheim's humor at the expense of the upper classes balances his cynicism. Then there are the apple blossoms... Robert Desnos wrote in 1929: "(The) avant-garde in cinema, as in literature and theater, is a fiction...All it would take to convince you of the imposture would be to project a moth-eaten film of yours before or after the admirable Wedding March by Stroheim...Here is a totally human film in all its moving and tragic beauty. Stroheim...what pain have you borne so long? What pain so great you cannot stop yourself reliving it...? It is precisely because Stroheim has the courage to show us love exactly as it is that he is today the most revolutionary and most human of directors. And not just for his famous apple blossoms, ridiculed by every species of artist, every enlightened soul, which are precisely the kind that move us most profoundly and legitimately..."