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Directed by Erich von Stroheim
Reconstructed by Rick Schmidlin
Starring Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt
USA, 1924; reconstruction 1999
Not Rated (adult themes)
THE GREATEST FILM EVER LOST
Erich von Stroheim’s silent masterpiece, Greed, is one of Hollywood’s
most tragic and debated cases. A whopping nine and a half hour
version of the film existed for a short period of time back in 1923 and
early 1924, was screened for a small circle of MGM people in January
of 1924, was edited again and again until it was condensed to a little
over two hours, and was released in December of ’24. The seven
hours of footage of Greed that was chopped off was burned by MGM
to extract the silver nitrate in the film, and that lost footage is the
Holy Grail of cinema. The bond between Stroheim and MGM’s Louis
B. Mayer was strained and never healed, and Greed will never be
seen in its original, intended form. Rick Schmidlin, a film restorer,
and the cable network Turner Classic Movies, have attempted to
bring the world a fuller version of Greed. Schmidlin stumbled
across over 650 stills of the film and Stroheim’s long-lost continuity
script, and from there, he pieced together a version that is hardly
the exact original film that was mutilated, but is the closest we will
ever get to experiencing Stroheim’s lengthy labor of love as he
intended.
The film is based on Frank Norris’ novel, McTeague, and it is reported that Stroheim meant to interpret the book for the screen word for word, comma for comma. I assume his nine hour version would have had a similar pace to the hefty, much-respected novel, which he was trying to replicate cinematically. The story is a very bitter tale of greed and its effects on families, friends, and lives. It is very negative in tone, which probably contributed to Louis B. Mayer’s motivation behind his orders for its mutilation just as much as its original length did.
Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland), a dentist, and his friend, Marcus Shouler (Jean Hersholt), both fall for Marcus’ cousin, Trina Sieppe (Zasu Pitts). Trina becomes a patient of McTeague’s, and he chloroforms her, kisses her while she’s unconscious, and smells her fragrance. I can’t imagine content like this not being a factor in Mayer’s disdain towards Stroheim and his film. This must have been daring stuff back in the Jazz Age. Marcus gives Trina to McTeague out of friendship, an act that shocked me in its casual treatment of marriage. After the two’s efforts to save their friendship, they are only torn apart by Trina’s winning $5,000 from a lottery ticket Marcus bought for her. Trina, a miser, saves every penny she can and, despite a good $400 she has saved three quarters into Schmidlin’s version, she refuses to save herself and her husband from financial turmoil after the dentist becomes unemployed. The film becomes a tug-of-war between McTeague and Trina of fortune and sadness, and later, a battle between McTeague and Marcus.
Greed’s story is overwhelmingly powerful: it provides a twisted web of lust and the dark sides of humanity without the gloss and glamour. The startling performances of Gibson Gowland and, in particular, Zasu Pitts, proves that this motion picture was years, perhaps decades, ahead of its time.
In the reconstructed version, two couples enter the plot who mirror both the innocence and the miserable struggle of McTeague and Trina’s marriage. The first couple are two elderly people who court each other pleasantly from a distance over several years; the second couple are a gypsy and a junk collector, the latter marrying the former for the wealth she claims her Central American family has. Stroheim’s presenting the parallels of three different relationships presents the audience with a relatively wide scope of greed as its presence poisons two of the marriages, and its absence makes the third thrive in love and peace. The comparisons made in the film between the three couples is an example of how Rick Schmidlin’s recreation helps us get a better sense of Stroheim’s original vision. The four additional characters the recreation introduces do not exist in the mutilated version.
This recreation also tints and colors a lot of the imagery of Stroheim’s film. Coins and gold are always accented in the film’s black and white terrain with bright yellow. The film is stunning visually, and often frightening. The image of two bony arms and hands fingering a pile of gold coins is intercut with several scenes and the image haunts me still. A number of scenes have Trina cradling, shining, talking to, and kissing her collection of coins- as if money has taken the place of human love and companionship in her life. Zasu Pitts and Gibson Gowland portray their characters with such sensitive frailty and wild malice, it is impossible not be affected.
At four and a half hours, this version of Greed is already long, though fully absorbing. I can’t imagine what five more hours would do to such a moving movie like this. Perhaps in Stroheim’s original version, there was even more development of his characters, maybe more storylines, and maybe an even slower, more contemplative pace. While I do not advocate MGM’s editing seven hours out of a beautiful, awesome piece of artistry, I do understand the studio’s decision to condense the work. First of all, there is only so long an audience can sit and watch a film and be absorbed in its story and magic. I know a nine hour movie would intimidate me- even this version of the film’s four and a half hours caused me to avoid it for an entire month. Most people are only awake for around fifteen hours in a day and the original Greed’s duration would have been too big of a fraction of one’s day for most to stomach. Secondly, movies and Hollywood are a business and studios always think in commercial terms, rarely in the artist’s frame of mind. The film at its original running time would have no commercial prospects, although, if it were shown in installments it would have stood a chance (or maybe not, if one considers that peppy ‘20s folk probably would not have wanted to sit through nine and a half hours of depressing material, whether in episodes or not.)
It remains to be seen whether the two hour version or Schmidlin’s version of Stroheim’s film will be the Greed for the ages. The recreation restores character development, complete characters, and bits and pieces of the film’s story and I am grateful to Rick Schmidlin for his time and effort in piecing together the material he discovered. Some, however, may find the inclusion of stills distracting since they don’t move and all Schmidlin adds are angles and opticals from Stroheim’s script. I think the stills mix in with the moving footage with a surprising smoothness. One is left to ponder from the stills what the lost footage was like. Erich von Stroheim became the enemy of the very powerful Louis B. Mayer, who despised him for ‘wasting’ a great amount of studio money on a non-commercial movie. The legend of Stroheim’s Greed tells not only of studio tampering, but of an interesting style of adaptation Stroheim based his film’s structure on- it is possible that a filmmaker has never been as faithful to a source of material than Stroheim was to Frank Norris’ McTeague. The recreation cannot begin to compensate for the loss of an artist’s "sincere work," but hopefully the considerable publicity Turner Classic Movies gave Schmidlin’s version’s premiere on cable will lead to the public (re)discovering a telling and deeply stirring motion picture that is a masterpiece even without much of its own original footage. Hopefully generations from now can look at the surviving version of the film not simply as an example of the dangers of commercialism to art, but as one of the best films of all time that, thankfully, wasn’t destroyed altogether.
By Andrew Chan
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