The last time Erich von Stroheim’s 1925—silent—version of “The Merry Widow” (an operetta without singing!) was on TCM, I DVR’d it and saw part of it soon thereafter. (It’s coming back on Tuesday, August 24, at 8:30 A.M. E.T.—there’s time to clear out the hard drive.) I was shocked, if not surprised, to note that it’s not an operetta but an Erich von Stroheim film. That is, it depicts the hereditary aristocracy in terms of smell: pomade and perfume and makeup hardly conceal the dubious sanitary conditions of the teeming cities, where the royal pageantry can’t keep the livestock away. The crowds with which Stroheim fills exteriors and interiors alike suggest the slums and the back alleys that, in his films, merge with surprising ease with society’s showplaces—a point of view that could only have been reinforced by his experiences with Hollywood’s parvenu potentates (of which he, the son of a hat manufacturer, was one). Hardly a thoroughgoing study of the movie’s plot and characters; nonetheless, its causticity smarts all the more for seeping through the familiar silken comforts of the source material.