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On January 12, 1924, a staff of studio executives at MGM including Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer filed into the screening room to view Erich von Stroheim's masterwork, Greed. Nearly 8 hours later they stood up infuriated at the money and time consumed by the opus. Thalberg ordered the director to recut the film; he returned with a four-hour version. Flexing his muscle, Thalberg sent von Stroheim back to the editing room again. The director enlisted his friend fellow filmmaker Rex Ingram to pare down the film. After he finished streamlining the film, Ingram told von Stroheim, "If you cut one more foot [of film] I shall never speak to you again!" Still unsatisfied, Thalberg assigned the project to Joseph Farnham, an apprentice editor, who completed the final butchering of the film, down to 140 minutes. Like a victorious Roman general razing Carthage, Thalberg ordered the footage destroyed.
Legends surrounding the brilliance of Greed have kept the film alive. Rick Schmidlin, who spearheaded the restoration of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil last year, rose to the challenge of rediscovering von Stroheim's maligned masterpiece. Like an archaeologist, Schmidlin excavated lost footage and hundreds of stills and, together with editor Glenn Morgan, the production team reassembled a four-hour version of Greed - complete with color-tinting - that lives up to the film's mythic status.
Erich von Stroheim served his apprenticeship under D.W. Griffith as an assistant director on The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). In Hearts of the World (1918), Griffith's World War I propaganda film, von Stroheim inaugurated his boot-clicking German stereotype - the Man You Love To Hate - which was an epithet that would stick with him. Von Stroheim soon proved himself as one of Hollywood's first 'auteurs,' writing, directing, designing sets and costumes and starring in Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922). Again, he played the 'hated Hun,' but these pictures were notable for their commitment to realism; the director was striving to elevate cheap entertainment into an art form. Von Stroheim's fanatically uncompromising extravagance was already causing studio bosses concern but his films, which wallowed in decadence and perversity, made their money back with box-office success.
In 1923 Erich von Stroheim had his first standoff with the figure that would become his nemesis, Irving Thalberg. Thalberg was 'the boy wonder,' Universal Studio's 24-year-old head of production. There was immediate friction between these two figures; they viewed filmmaking through two fundamentally different lenses. Thalberg was a manager who saw motion pictures as a business and industry while von Stroheim was a creative genius whose vision of film was as a new Art. As the director brought a lurid love triangle to the screen in The Merry-Go-Round, the project went over budget, as usual. This time, with Thalberg behind the desk, the film was taken away from von Stroheim and assigned to Rupert Julian, a director-on-staff. Von Stroheim left the studio in disgust.
For his next project, von Stroheim envisioned adapting Frank Norris' novel of 1899, "McTeague: A Story of San Francisco." The author's writing emphasized naturalism in the story of three average Americans' descent into lives of lies, deceit, greed, poverty and murder. The theme obviously appealed to the director. Legend has it that von Stroheim set out to translate the book to film page by page. He intended to shoot Greed on location in San Francisco - a bold move artistically, technically and financially in 1923. But the pursuit of realism was essential; he even had actors move into the houses that served as sets. From the get-go, von Stroheim was obsessing over details. Greed was begun at Metro studios under Louis B. Mayer but shortly after the film began production, Metro and Goldwyn merged and von Stroheim once again found himself under the thumb of Irving Thalberg, production manager.
Greed starred Gibson Gowland as a dimwitted behemoth, McTeague, who rises from the life of a gold miner to become a dentist in San Francisco. He befriends Marcus (Jean Hersholt) and soon falls in love with his buddy's girlfriend, Trina (Zasu Pitts). Shortly after McTeague and Trina are engaged she wins the lottery, a $5000 jackpot. Marcus, who had willingly let McTeague court his sweetheart, now envies her golden dowry. The money draws each character into a downward spiral. Trina refuses to spend a cent, and transforms into a miserly hag as McTeague loses his livelihood and becomes a street urchin. The film climaxes as Marcus pursues McTeague, fleeing from the desperate murder of his wife, into Death Valley. The devastating final shot has the silhouette of one figure standing over his friend as he discovers his wrist shackled to the corpse. In the Shakespearean tradition, no one escapes alive from this tragedy.
Shooting on location in Death Valley presented some logistical problems. The nearest town was 100 miles away. Daytime temperatures regularly reached 120 degrees. Von Stroheim moved forward, stating that he could only capture the true agony of the scene by shooting in the desert. Jean Hersholt was hospitalized with severe dehydration...but von Stroheim got his scene. Greed wrapped in August 1923 after 10 months of shooting.
Meanwhile MGM was in its formative stages as a star-studded dream factory that churned out glossy feel-good family oriented entertainment. Greed definitely did not fit the bill. When Irving Thalberg demanded recuts, the history of Hollywood was set into motion. Schmidlin sees the sea change as "a conscious shift from the artistic creative freedom of the director to the new studio power." The film set a precedent: while Griffith, Fairbanks, Pickford and Chaplin had asserted their creative freedom with the formation of United Artists in 1919, von Stroheim's incident only four years later illustrated who would hold the power for the duration of the studio era.
Even in its abridged form, Greed has been praised as a work of genius. Schmidlin has seen his restoration effort as a search for "the Holy Grail of cinema." In his cinematic excavation, Schmidlin has unearthed lost characters and forgotten plot points, adhering to a 330-page shooting script and sorting through mountains of photographic evidence.
The reconstructed Greed opens with a shot of the apparatus of mining equipment churning; gold-tinted nuggets glimmer from a slop of mud. McTeague is a miner, but the gold his eye catches is a wounded canary. He isn't interested in the worth of gold but of priceless life. His father (Jack Curtis), completely excised from the existing version of the film, is resurrected as a drunken sot who spends his days with barroom prostitutes ignoring his hard-working wife (Tempe Piggott). Von Stroheim developed the fascinating relationship between Mr. and Mrs. McTeague. When Mr. McTeague drops dead on the barroom floor, his revolting lover laughs over his corpse. Mrs. McTeague sends her son off to apprentice with a dentist.
In San Francisco, the director details the everyday life of the city, from the rich department store owner to the local junk man. The apparently drug-addled cleaning woman of the building that houses McTeague's dental practice, Maria Macapa (Dale Fuller), raves about the wealth she once possessed. Her subplot, cut entirely out of Thalberg's version, introduces Zerkow, the junk man. Zerkow is a slimy, shady, stringy-haired figure brilliantly personified by Cesare Gravina. Together these two characters are mired in filth and fantasies of wealth. As a counterpoint to the filthy perversity of Zerkow and Maria, von Stroheim introduces Old Grannis (Frank Hayes) and Miss Baker (Fanny Midgley). Grannis is an old bachelor who spends the long evenings bookbinding. A plywood wall divides the room he rents; on the other side lives a spinster. They love and admire each other from afar; they know each other's private habits, listening intently through the thin divider. Through McTeague, the two finally meet and begin a relationship based on love and affection, the very opposite of Zerkow and Maria. While von Stroheim had intended for all golden objects-nuggets, coins, canaries and garish gold teeth--to be tinted, as Old Grannis and Miss Baker's relationship blossoms, von Stroheims's intention was for the screen to explode in full color. Schmidlin has remained true to the director's vision; tinted stills are dazzling, a shock of color and love in a cold black-and-white world.
The first two hours of Schmidlin's restoration focus on character development, setting the scene of a bustling San Francisco. In the second half, Greed delves into the pained psyches of the film's three focal characters. In John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, wealth perverts man's nature and greed is at the root of all evil. Von Stroheim's world is not as simple. Greed takes a more fatalistic approach to life; when Mac takes to drink, it is the realization of his internal tendencies, seen earlier in the example of father MacTeague. Trina is always seen in pain, from the first time we meet her aching with a toothache. During their courtship, Trina appears to abhor Mac's touch. While it is unclear whether her reaction is due to her Victorian virtue or an aberrant sexuality, after winning the lottery, she descends into a haze of madness. The only moment that the waters of Trina's madness seem to abet is in a still photo restored by Schmidlin. In that image, Trina and her double Maria sit on a bed fantasizing of grand wealth. Whether von Stroheim is developing the sexuality of these characters or drawing a comparison between them is unclear, open to interpretation. Both are driven delusional by the pathological hoarding of their savings. Maria is impregnated and then murdered by Zerkow, whose body soon after washes up in the bay. Trina will be bludgeoned to death by her husband. The gold leads to each characters demise, but rather than the inherent evil of avarice, von Stroheim seems to point to internal character flaws as the reason behind each demise. The unspoken moral of the story is 'Know thyself.'
Erich von Stroheim would direct three more films: The Merry Widow (1925), The Wedding March (1928) and Queen Kelly (1928). While The Merry Widow was the director's most commercially successful film, his directing career ended on a note similar to Greed and The Merry-Go-Round. Queen Kelly was taken away from von Stroheim, and as fate would have it, he never directed another film again. Stripped of his art, von Stroheim still had his craft. As an actor he was still larger than life as The Man You Love To Hate. He played a German general in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by French master Jean Renoir and was perhaps most memorable as Max von Mayerling in Billy Wilder's scathing ode to Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950). Wilder brilliantly paired von Stroheim with Gloria Swanson, the star and producer of his last unfinished film, Queen Kelly. In Sunset Boulevard, the tension below the surface simmers. With his head held high, von Stroheim's dignified performance was as dark and self-referential as Swanson's swan song. Nearly a decade earlier, Wilder had first worked with von Stroheim in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Upon meeting the pioneering director, Wilder reportedly commented, "Imagine, little me, working with you! You were ten years ahead of your time." And in characteristic fashion, von Stroheim barked back, "20!"
Once thought lost, on its 75th anniversary Greed is as powerful as ever. Rick Schmidlin has resurrected a key silent film. Each photographic still is given personality and depth; even motion is both inferred as well as created with swooping arcs and pans across the vivid prints. Restored to its original speed of 16 frames per second, Greed gains a hypnotic quality. The screen opens a window of a distant time and place that is so engaging that you'll forget the mammoth running time. You'll disappear into this imaginary world, shivering in the cold rain with Mac and sweating beneath the blistering sun of Death Valley. Even when you know it's coming, the ending is still sure to shock - the director's vision is that clear and the cinematography is that vivid. Unlike many legends, Greed lives up to its mythic status as one of the most uncompromisingly realistic and artistic films not just of its time, but of all time.
5 SUNDAY
8:00 PM Greed (Restored Version) (1924)
12:30 AM Greed (Restored Version) (1924)
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