22. Greed (1924)

Directed by Erich Von Stroheim


Synopsis

There's this guy McTeague, who is essentially a good man, but a bit simple in the head. He learns the "profession" of dentist through the aid of a quack doctor. He opens his office in San Francisco and one day Trina comes in with her boyfriend Marcus. Trina buys a lottery ticket while waiting for the dentist. McTeague starts treating Trina through the course of several days. At one point he anestethises her with Ether and takes advantage.

Marcus is a good friend of Mac and Mac tells him he is in love with Trina. Marcus gives Trina up for his friend and McTeague and Trina get married. The lottery result comes up and Trina has won 5,000 dollars. Trina begins to obssess about her money and wont spend one dime of it. Marcus becomes seriouslty jealous and eventually leaves town, but not before denouncing McTeague for practising dentistry without a license. McTeague and Trina become extremely poor, and Trina keeps hiding her 5,000 bucks inside her chest. Mac becomes more and more disaffected with Trina who takes all his money. Eventually he leaves home. Trina takes a job cleaning a kindergarten and sleeps in between her gold coins at night. MacTeague eventually finds her, kills her and takes the money.

Mac flees town for Death Valley. Marcus is now living in a Cowboy town near Death Valley and decides to chase McTeague and get the money that he feels belongs to him. After a long chase in Death Valley Mac kills Marcus while handcuffed to him. The camera pans out of the desert with no escape for MacTeague who will eventually die with his 5,000 dollars.

Review

This is one of the most famous "lost-films". The film was originally 9 hours long, the only version I managed to get was 2 hours and 15 minutes long - a commercial cut demanded by the studios. The original no longer exists and that must surely be one of the greatest losses in cinema history. Even in it's slaughtered version this is one of the best silent films I've seen. Stroheim has a love for the grotesque that is rare in most directors and even rarer in 1924. He makes the whole film feel extremely uneasy even when nothing special is happening, you just know from moment one that it will go wrong. During the marriage scene, for example, there is a funeral cortege happening just outside the window behind the priest. All the sexuality in the film seems to be tinged with rape fantasies. No only when McTeague kisses the anaestethised Trina, but always. Even when Trina kisses McTeague she pulls his hair. There is Greed of more than one kind in this film.

The acting is also great, Zasu Pitts as Trina is adequately freaky and the actor playing McTeague also manages to express a range of feelings from tenderness to brutality. And that is another thing about the film, you don't empathise with anyone, if you would it would be McTeague who ends up as ravaged by Greed as all the other characters and is led to a double murder by it.

And that is the great moral point of the film, although it was described as filth when it came out (and it is hard to imagine what audiences thought even of the severely truncated version) it is a very rich examination of human motivations. Ostentatiously the Greed is for the 5,000 dollars, but greed is also for sex and power. McTeague seems more motivated to leave and kill Trina because of the power she exerts over him than because of the money.

A truly great film, I wish they find a full set of reels one day. Buy it at Amazon UK or US (if you have the money buy the US version seeing as it is a much more complete one than the one sold in the UK).

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

I was just discussing with a friend of mine how I would love to see a deleted scene of David Bowie getting it on with Ryuichi Sakamoto in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

From Wiki:


The story of the making of the movie has become a Hollywood legend. Under the aegis of the Goldwyn studio, Von Stroheim attempted to film a version of the book complete in every detail. To capture the authentic spirit of the story, he insisted on the filming on location in San Francisco, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and Death Valley, despite harsh conditions. The result was a final print of the film that was over eight hours in length, produced at a cost of over $500,000--an unheard of sum at that time. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that acquired Goldwyn during production, forced him to edit the film to a more manageable length, and he reluctantly delivered a print with a running time of just over four hours with the assistance of fellow director Rex Ingram and editor Grant Whytock. The film was then removed from his control and cut further, despite his protests. Even key characters were removed from the final version so that it could be screened in a reasonable timeframe. Existing prints of Greed run at about two hours and twenty minutes. The hours of cut film were destroyed (although it appears that much of it survived until at least the late 1950s), and this film is known as one of the most famous "lost" films in cinema history. The released version of the film was a box-office failure, and was fiercely panned by critics. In later years, even in its shortened form, it was recognized as one of the great realistic films. Rare behind-the-scenes footage of Greed can be seen in the Goldwyn Pictures film Souls for Sale.

In 1999, Turner Entertainment (the film's current rights holder) decided to "recreate," as close as possible, the original version by combining the existing footage with still photographs of the lost scenes, in accordance with an original continuity outline written by director Erich von Stroheim. This restoration (such as it is) runs almost four-and-a-half hours. (Other classic films with missing footage include Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon and von Stroheim's Queen Kelly.)