The title of this post has given me no end of agida. After all, it wasn’t precisely VON STROHEIM’S Greed which premiered on December 4, 1924. HIS version was over 8 hours long. The version that was released to the public, the only one we have ever seen, is only about 1/5 the length of the original movie. But I felt the need to qualify the title because otherwise you might think that I meant that the third Deadly Sin had only been around for 100 years. It’s been around slightly longer than that.
Even butchered, Von Stroheim’s film is considered by many to be one of the greatest films of all time. As I mentioned in my earlier post, it was on many top ten lists when I was a kid. It had reached that status during the major critical re-evaulation then in process as part of the auteur movement starting in the 1950s, which also enshrined other films of the era like The Gold Rush, City Lights, The General, The Navigator, and Sunrise. Though released with great fanfare at William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmpolitan Theatre (located on Columbus Circle in New York), and plugged by all the Hearst papers, the film was a critical and commercial flop in its own time, generally regarded as too nasty, cynical, and graphic. Naturally by the ’70s people were like, “Yeah, that’s just how life is!”
I am a huge fan of the 1899 novel on which the film is based, Frank Norris’s McTeague, which I’ve read three times, and find so pleasurable I will surely have at it again more than once. Influenced by Zola and Darwin, it tells the tawdry story of a brutish lout who, through a combination of circumstances that only would have been possible in the 19th century, lucks into a career as a San Francisco dentist. He learned the skills on the job and, with close supervision, could probably qualify as a passable dental assistant in a more orderly world, but he got in under the wire in an age when drastic quackery was much easier to accomplish. Eventually the law catches up with him and he is stripped of his license. By then he has married a woman with a tidy nest egg. What seemed a satisfying arrangement to both parties at the beginning proves fatal as the miserly wife denies the dentist any access to her substantial savings even for necessities. The tension builds until McTeague brutally murders the wife and runs off with her pile of loot. The whole thing ends in a remarkable climax where McTeague battles his former friend and rival in the middle of Death Valley, culminating in a jaw dropping finish.
Von Stroheim, who had lived in San Francisco for a time, loved the novel for its realistic detail, and its strong, clear theme. A perfectionist, he seems to have filmed every moment in the book, an interesting approach that almost nobody has ever attempted, mostly because novels and films are different forms of expression, with different formal requirements. There are few theatrical creators who would have the audacity to expect an audience to sit still for eight hours — Wagner and Warhol are two rare examples I can think of. A serial would be the more conventional approach in the movies, if you wanted to tell every single second of the story, but Von Stroheim seems not to have wanted to dole out the tale a chapter at a time. Just sit there, damn you! I’m a maniac and I have certainly remained in a theatre seat for longer than eight hours at certain festivals, but even I would have no appetite, I don’t think, for an eight hour narrative feature film, which is why I include Greed in this post about “lost films” I can live without seeing. That, and the existing version is a masterpiece as it is.
Gibson Gowland, who’d been in a couple of Von Stroheim’s earlier movies, plays McTeague. One of the most memorable elements of the film for me is always that preposterous blonde curly wig he wears as the character, a peculiarly German obsession I associate with such performers as Sandow the Great, and Dietrich in the “Hot Voodoo” number from Blonde Venus. Gowland was mostly a supporting player, usually a bit player. Greed was his only starring role. The part called for a lummox, and he delivered.
The photo above illustrates two reasons for the classic comedy-lover to embrace the film. Zasu Pitts plays McTeague’s wife in the film. Von Stroheim was so much enamoured of Pitts’ acting ability he felt that she should NEVER play comedy, only tragedy. And in silent film especially it is easy to see his point. Her face and the way she moves are truly remarkable. It’s really just her voice (the inspiration for Olive Oyl, after all) that makes her comical. Also in the photo above is silent screen comedian Hughie Mack, who has a supporting role as a local artisan in the movie. Chester Conklin is in Greed too, as Zasu’s father, and so is Frank Hayes.
Another connection to silent comedy? This idea of scale, of nature, the great outdoors (in this case Death Valley) embodying the movie’s theme very much seems to me to relate to both The Navigator and The Gold Rush, each of which came out around the same time. And the existential backdrop of the Arizona desert in Krazy Kat. I guess it was just in the air. Or if you prefer, the dentist’s gas…
And let us not forget dentistry humor, which was such a slapstick subgenre that I wrote an entire post about it here.
After Gowland and Pitts, the third major star in the film is well known to silent movie fans, Jean Hersholt, who plays Marcus, Mcteague’s former friend and antagonist.
The final moments in Greed are among just a handful of ones I can think of (Duel in the Sun, Vertigo, Out of the Blue) where you just can’t believe what you just saw. No, you di’n’t! The story is so good I’m surprised no one has remade it, or at least stolen the plot, but I guess no one would dare.
Gonna get preachy again on ya today, because that’s where current events have put my head, and because great movies make you think. At this writing, a bunch of greedy, selfish people just put their chips on a course of action almost certain to end in destruction. Tunnel vision took them there. And in their blind mania to destroy those they demonized, before the final credits roll, it’s a virtual certainty that they will also ring down the curtain on themselves.
For more on silent movie classics please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook!