The story ends with a passage from a non-existent novel called Foolish Wives: “And thus it happened that disillusionment came finally to a foolish wife, who found in her own husband the nobility she had sought for in a counterfeit.”
       The final card contains the following information: “It’s a Universal Picture. Did you like it? Write me your opinion. – Carl Laemmle, Pres.” Laemmle was so concerned with the expense of Foolish Wives that he appealed to theater owners and distributors in a two full-page advertisement in the 1 Jan 1922 FD to “bid for” the movie, because “Universal’s Million Dollar Picture is so totally beyond the class of any production ever before attempted that it must be handled in a revolutionary manner. Universal can never get its money back on this stupendous super-production.… We will have to take in two and one half million to break even.” Laemmle asked exhibitors “to make your very highest bid for Foolish Wives.
       Elaborate replicas of the casino and plaza of Monte Carlo, along with a French village, a castle, and many interiors were built in Point Lobus, south of Monterey, CA, the 30 Oct 1920 Exhibitors Herald reported. Several hundred carpenters worked for weeks to recreate the Riviera resort. The 20 Nov 1920 Exhibitors Herald announced that director Erich von Stroheim was filming his final scenes. Among the extras were several San Francisco, CA, millionaires, including banker Charles Crocker and his wife, Mary Ann Deming, who agreed to appear in return for Carl Laemmle donating $3,000 to their favorite charities.
       The production reportedly cost over $1 million, according to the 28 Jan 1923 Exhibitors Herald. von Stroheim, a notorious perfectionist, shot thousands of feet of film and took eighteen months to complete the film. The Jul 1921 and Oct 1921 issues of Motion Picture revealed that he began the project thinking it would cost only $250,000. Filming went on so long that one of the leading men, Rudolph Christians, died and a double replaced him for the rest of the picture; actresses lost or gained noticeable amounts of weight. Von Stroheim presented Foolish Wives to Universal as a fourteen-reel film, but was ordered to cut it down to ten or eleven. (Another source, the 11 Jan 1922 FD, reports that Von Stroheim began with 32 reels of film.) Eventually, Universal took the film away from him, according to the 22 Aug 1922 FD. The advertising tag line for the film, using Von Stroheim’s own villainous “Count Sergius Karamzin” as the illustration, was “The Man You Will Love to Hate.”
       The 7 Jul 1922 FD announced that, of Universal’s upcoming fifty-seven films, twelve of them would be “Jewels,” released at the rate of one a month. The first was Foolish Wives, scheduled for Aug 1922, although the film had premiered eight months earlier, on 11 Jan 1922, in New York City.
       According to the 11 Jan 1922 FD,. reviews from major publications generally praised the photography and sets, but felt there was “too much Von Stroheim.” In Columbus, OH, the main critic was the Ohio State Censor Board, which rejected Foolish Wives, the 6 Feb 1922 FD reported. Universal sent Harry Berman to appeal the decision, but the board stated it would “stand pat on its decision.”
       The Jun 1922 issue of The Educational Screen listed Foolish Wives as one of the year’s “Fifteen Best Productions (of those reviewed so far).” It called the film “unclassified because of its strangely dual aspect. Foolish Wives was a great picture, carefully directed, perhaps one of the best in motion picture history. But in our minds, it could not be listed without this reservation,—it's material was unfit for general public consumption; it belonged in psychopathic records.”
       A new 147-minute version (up from Universal's 117-minute cut) with hand-tinted color passages, restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art, opened the 2022 San Francisco Silent Film Festival on 5 May 2022. An older version was available on YouTube in 2020.