Greed

At first there was only one long version of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, which was called the greatest film they had ever seen and probably will ever see by the few who saw it. It was 42 reels long (something in the order of 10 hours), and it boldly went where no studio has ever liked it before; like the story’s main couple who loses their sanity one moment after another, the film was cut to smaller and smaller pieces until Stroheim disowned it and it was released to mostly negative reviews. The 140 minute-long version of the film is still called one of the greatest films ever made, but since 1999 there’s been an incomplete 239 minute-long version that gives us glimpses of what it probably was. We can only imagine the masterpiece that cannot be found in this consolation prize, and perhaps it’s best to save this restored version for later and start with the shorter one. But it’s still a definite example of something we don’t get to see very often in film.

When talking about cinema, filmmakers and critics often talk about art rules and conventions that serve and don’t serve the big screen. Andrei Tarkovsky, for instance, famously said in an interview that painting conventions should not mix with cinema conventions, and that there can’t be realism in film when the colors aren’t realistic and discreet. In the same interview he deplored the exhausting tradition of needlessly adapting so many literature classics, pointing one of the many sings that cinema often lacks people with originality and devotion to the new and the unexpected. These adaptations often give us diminished, simplified versions of masterpieces of literature, and this is why Kubrick often worked with lesser books and expanded – or complemented – theirs ideas in his films. But even Kubrick’s films, most of them timeless and breathtaking, feel much more like films than like screen novels or screen romances. Before Kubrick and Tarkovsky’s golden ages, especially much before that, some of the great filmmakers were unconditional disciples of literature and its power and passionately wanted to elevate film to its status: D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Giovanni Pastrone, Erich von Stroheim, Victor Sjöstrom.

Greed is exactly the kind of film that can hardly be thought of nowadays, although recently television and slow cinema has given us new hopes. Based on the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, it tells not one story, but three, each giving different versions of the way money and gold can drive people mad, corruptible and envious of one another. The central story, that of McTeague (Gibson Gowland), Trina Siepper (ZaSu Pitts) and Marcus (Jean Hersholt), is the only one left in the modern version. Marcus, Trina’s cousin, loves her, but when he introduces her to McTeague so that she can fix a broken tooth, the dentist is devastated by her beauty and falls in love with her; they get engaged, to his friend’s misery and surprise, and things grow more complicated for the trio when Trina is told her lottery ticket has earned her a life-changing sum of five thousand dollars, and greed engulfs her whole when other people – including Marcus and McTeague – seek after its use. The story develops in the naturalist style of Émile Zola, and a veil of tragedy and inevitability surrounds its characters like a predator circling around its prey.

Greed, the complete film, is a fantastic experience, and an example of the kind of silent film that the hungriest directors were doing at the time: bold in its thematic choices, and starved for new camera techniques, new forms of storytelling, and even color and sound. How could you do a film about a man passionate about music who plays the concertina to his future bride if not with sound? And how could you show the deceptive beauty of gold if not with its bright, flashing color? Stroheim understood that cinema had its limitations at the time, and that some images can only be achieved through improvements in technology, but he craved for these images and wanted them viciously. Many scenes in the film are bathed in gold, and Stroheim, dissatisfied with black-and-white, gold-tinted them himself. Detached from the black-and-white of the film, money looks even more enchanting.

The film’s power is in the way that it shows that greed can assume many forms, regardless of social or cultural status (this is were the long version helps us understand Stroheim’s true purposes). It’s done with obvious but appealing symbolism: McTeague is a bird enthusiast, and he’s as much of a man as he is the birds he so carefully take care of. They’re vulnerable, beautiful and joyful, full of love and compassion. But humankind has grown to put these birds in cages and restrict their freedoms and control their live with food and water; in the limited space they have, they often grow aggressive against each other and are easily threatened by external sources – in the film, Marcus is the cat that jumps and attacks the cage before McTeague pushes him away. When all is over, we wonder whether we should’ve really caged these birds and given them illusions of safety and companionship, much like money is an illusion to us. But it’s over, and then so is the film, in a heartbreaking version of pessimism that was the main reason why the film was so aggressively butchered.

The fact that the story is artificially unilateral is precisely why the truncated restored version of Greed, near four hours long, isn’t much but a complement for the current complete version, even though it lacks more information we could possibly want from it. This new version, equipped with 650 stills from remaining pieces that couldn’t work together in addition to the existing material, is interesting because it shows branches of the story that enlighten certain points of the story and adds is substance and complexity; to know them gives us the opportunity of filling the gaps in the story with our imagination. It also gives us, in fresh fashion, something of a modernized version of an impossible restoration; Greed becomes half a silent epic, half a photo-roman, and some sort of a historical document.

It’s still, nevertheless, a stretch: it shows us the film that is and the film that could be, but the unfinished film as revealed is so intriguing it becomes almost unsatisfying to watch it with so many parts missing. To watch the long version before the short one must have been the wrong thing, because the long version feels much more complex and intricate, while the shorter version is all about Trina’s greed and the McTeague’s hatred of it. As a consequence, the story goes from a unilateral film to a multilateral collection of images and intertitles. The result is a good film, but a reduced experience.

Greed

Year: 1924

Director: Erich von Stroheim

Cast: Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Chester Conklin, Silvia Ashton, Dale Fuller

Sight and Sound’s Top 250: #84 (tied)