The film opens following a murder at a cabaret in Mexico City in 1936; a shot is heard, but the body of the female victim (Connie) has been strangled. The police take the woman's husband into custody, assuming he is the murderer. But Flamarion, who has been shot, is the murderer and he explains to a stagehand in flashback why he killed Connie. The Great Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim) is an arrogant, friendless, and misogynousmarksman who displays his trick gunshot act in the vaudeville circuit. His show features a beautiful assistant, Connie (Mary Beth Hughes); her drunken husband Al (Dan Duryea is Flamarion's other assistant. Flamarion falls in love with Connie, the movie's femme fatale, and is soon manipulated by her into killing her no good husband during one of their acts.
After Al's supposed accidental death, Connie convinces Flamarion to wait three months before the two can marry and flees back to Hibbing, Minnesota. Meanwhile, Connie has already begun a relationship with another performer, Eddie (Stephen Barclay). After she fails to show up at an arranged meeting place three months later, Flamarion goes into a downward spiral of drinking and gambling. Flamarion eventually finds Connie who informs him that she never loved him and used him to get rid of her husband.
Mann said "Von Stroheim, to say the least, was difficult. He was a personality, not really an actor. He looked well on film. But he was a great director. I’ll never forget one thing. He said: ‘Tony, do you want to be a great director? Photograph the whole of Great Flamarion through my monocle!’ I said: ‘That’s a helluvan idea, but I only
have $150,000 and fourteen days.’ I said: ‘It might be a fascinating idea, but I’ll let you do it'... He drove me mad. He was a genius. I’m not a genius: I’m a worker. Geniuses sometimes end up very unhappy, without a penny. That’s what happened to Erich and Preston Sturges, too."[1]
