The silent drama tells the story of a man who adopts the name and title of Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin (Erich von Stroheim) to seduce rich women and extort money from them.

He has set up shop in Monte Carlo, and his partners in crime (and possible lovers) are his cousins: "Princess" Vera Petchnikoff (Mae Busch ) and "Her Highness" Olga Petchnikoff (Maude George).

Count Karamzin begins his latest scam on the unworldly wife of an American envoy, Helen Hughes (Miss DuPont), even though her husband (Rudolph Christians) is nearby. He attempts to charm her, planning to eventually fleece her of her money. She is easily impressed by his faux-aristocratic glamor, to the chagrin of her dull, but sincere, husband. Karamzin also has his eye on two other women, Maruschka (Dale Fuller), a maid at the hotel, and Marietta (Malvina Polo), the mentally disabled daughter of one of his criminal associates (Cesare Gravina), seeing them both as easy sexual prey.

During the climax of the film Maruschka, the maid he has seduced and abandoned, goes mad and sets fire to a building in which Karamzin and Mrs. Hughes are trapped. To save himself, Karamzin jumps, leaving Mrs Hughes in danger. She is saved and looked after by her devoted husband. Karamzin's public displays of selfishness and cowardice ensure that he is shunned by the high society by whom he craves to be accepted. Humiliated, he tries to restore his pride by seducing Marietta, the mentally disabled girl. Her father kills him, dumping his body in a sewer. Karamzin's "cousins" are arrested for being imposters and con-artists.

A 1922 American erotic silent drama film produced and distributed by Universal Pictures under their Super-Jewel banner and written and directed by Erich von Stroheim. When released in 1922, the film was the most expensive film made at that time, and billed by Universal Studios as the "first million-dollar movie" to come out of Hollywood. Originally, von Stroheim intended the film to run anywhere between 6 and 10 hours, and be shown over two evenings, but Universal executives opposed this idea. The studio bosses cut the film drastically before the release date. The fulsome media coverage and “sensational notoriety” elevated von Stroheim into the ranks of preeminent directors of the early 1920s. His genuine talent was fully acknowledged among critics and the public, marking him as an heir to D. W. Griffith. In 2008, Foolish Wives was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".