I hate to admit how long it took me to "get around to" renting this from the Facets crew in Chicago, in fact this was the 150th title (the previous 149 including some real dreck). Now that I finally have, I think it's a damn shame that Erich Von Stroheim couldn't have been around nowadays when this could've been a series on HBO. As you've all heard, the original nine-hour offering was mutilated in various stages down to a few hours; the resulting cinematic corpse must've been downright baffling for 1924 audiences. What I've seen is the 1999 239-minute reconstruction using a lot of still photos. The original gold tinting has been restored (for the giant tooth etc.) and some of the stills of the nice elderly couple are fully colored. There's also a new score which fits in pretty well.
I haven't read the Frank Norris novel on which this is based, but apparently Stroheim followed it faithfully, if not fanatically. Over a period of 15-20 years we follow a California miner named McTeague as he becomes an apprentice dentist, then practices on his own in San Francisco, then is forced to give that up and returns to being a miner after killing his increasingly crazy wife; fleeing the law he winds up in Death Valley handcuffed to a corpse. Two factors show how far "ahead of his time" Stroheim was: first the relentless grimness of his vision of humanity as slaves to their various weaknesses, and second his nuances in terms of the performances he gets from his actors and in his presentation of events. Most of you have probably seen at least a few silent films, you know how theatrically over the top most of the acting was (to be fair to the actors, of course they didn't have their voices available, plus that was the style of the day). But Stroheim gets some wonderful naturalism from his cast, principally from the "hero" Gibson Gowland, a big lug who lets his inner urges both toward kindness and cruelty seem to well up from within rather than being imposed from the outside. Near the beginning and the end McTeague is seen kissing a tiny bird he's carefully holding in his huge hand; the second one is his pet that he's about to set free anticipating his own death; it's as poignant as a similar moment that Rutger Hauer had years later in "Bladerunner." Unfortunately Jean Hersholt as McTeague's best friend and later bitter enemy is more conventionally hammy, and Zasu Pitts as McTeague's doomed wife Trina plays virtually every scene with her eyeballs bulging; again, to be fair to the actors, that maybe was what Stroheim wanted. I personally was disappointed that some downright gruesome elements only survive in the still shots, such as McTeague getting his ear bitten nearly off in a wrestling match with his friend, or his wife discovering the corpse of the local junk dealer's wife, then having a nightmare about the latter (in the dream the dead woman seems to have as many teeth as Lon Chaney in "London After Midnight"). But along with the viciousness and degradation there's also some genuine tenderness (mostly involving the old couple who live next to each other for years before finally getting intimate) and even some humor, mostly of the "black" variety. ("Black humor," it's an old expression not involving African-Americans, you can Google it.) As a final "modernism," there's really no "emotional payoff" as such; it's basically a bleak view of humanity carried through to the bitter end, and to paraphrase the Frank Norris quote seen at the outset, people will like it or they won't. But I doubt they'll forget it.
I will confess that parts of "Greed" seem dated now, such as the depiction of Trina's German immigrant parents with their Katzenjammer-Kids dialog cards, also some vaguely anti-Semitic elements; the junk dealer has a Jewish-sounding name and looks somewhat like the old drawings of Charles Dickens' Fagin character; there's also a sign for SEMITE BUTCHER. (I read that Stroheim may have been originally Jewish himself before adding "Von" to his name, so maybe this was also a subtle dig at the "goyim.") The junk dealer's wife seems a stereotypical "shifty Mexican." I would imagine Stroheim was again adhering to the novel. Some of Stroheim's directorial flourishes veer a little too close to "German expressionism," such as a recurring shot of a pair of gnarled arms caressing a pile of gold coins, or a similar recurring shot of several pairs of arms clutching at a pile of gold dishes. There's a scene with McTeague's cat leaping up to attack a birdcage that clearly involved the cat being tossed into the air. I could probably think of a few other quibbles but I'm really not so inclined. As my (unprecedented) 10 out of 10 vote indicates, I want to convey what an amazing achievement this movie is, even in it's truncated form, and whatever issues I may have with Ted Turner, may the movie gods bless him for presiding over this reconstruction. ("Colorizing" the classics, on the other hand...) Bottom line, don't just see this out of a "sense of duty." See it because it's relevant to us now, reminding us that we have choices in life, and those choices have consequences...
I haven't read the Frank Norris novel on which this is based, but apparently Stroheim followed it faithfully, if not fanatically. Over a period of 15-20 years we follow a California miner named McTeague as he becomes an apprentice dentist, then practices on his own in San Francisco, then is forced to give that up and returns to being a miner after killing his increasingly crazy wife; fleeing the law he winds up in Death Valley handcuffed to a corpse. Two factors show how far "ahead of his time" Stroheim was: first the relentless grimness of his vision of humanity as slaves to their various weaknesses, and second his nuances in terms of the performances he gets from his actors and in his presentation of events. Most of you have probably seen at least a few silent films, you know how theatrically over the top most of the acting was (to be fair to the actors, of course they didn't have their voices available, plus that was the style of the day). But Stroheim gets some wonderful naturalism from his cast, principally from the "hero" Gibson Gowland, a big lug who lets his inner urges both toward kindness and cruelty seem to well up from within rather than being imposed from the outside. Near the beginning and the end McTeague is seen kissing a tiny bird he's carefully holding in his huge hand; the second one is his pet that he's about to set free anticipating his own death; it's as poignant as a similar moment that Rutger Hauer had years later in "Bladerunner." Unfortunately Jean Hersholt as McTeague's best friend and later bitter enemy is more conventionally hammy, and Zasu Pitts as McTeague's doomed wife Trina plays virtually every scene with her eyeballs bulging; again, to be fair to the actors, that maybe was what Stroheim wanted. I personally was disappointed that some downright gruesome elements only survive in the still shots, such as McTeague getting his ear bitten nearly off in a wrestling match with his friend, or his wife discovering the corpse of the local junk dealer's wife, then having a nightmare about the latter (in the dream the dead woman seems to have as many teeth as Lon Chaney in "London After Midnight"). But along with the viciousness and degradation there's also some genuine tenderness (mostly involving the old couple who live next to each other for years before finally getting intimate) and even some humor, mostly of the "black" variety. ("Black humor," it's an old expression not involving African-Americans, you can Google it.) As a final "modernism," there's really no "emotional payoff" as such; it's basically a bleak view of humanity carried through to the bitter end, and to paraphrase the Frank Norris quote seen at the outset, people will like it or they won't. But I doubt they'll forget it.
I will confess that parts of "Greed" seem dated now, such as the depiction of Trina's German immigrant parents with their Katzenjammer-Kids dialog cards, also some vaguely anti-Semitic elements; the junk dealer has a Jewish-sounding name and looks somewhat like the old drawings of Charles Dickens' Fagin character; there's also a sign for SEMITE BUTCHER. (I read that Stroheim may have been originally Jewish himself before adding "Von" to his name, so maybe this was also a subtle dig at the "goyim.") The junk dealer's wife seems a stereotypical "shifty Mexican." I would imagine Stroheim was again adhering to the novel. Some of Stroheim's directorial flourishes veer a little too close to "German expressionism," such as a recurring shot of a pair of gnarled arms caressing a pile of gold coins, or a similar recurring shot of several pairs of arms clutching at a pile of gold dishes. There's a scene with McTeague's cat leaping up to attack a birdcage that clearly involved the cat being tossed into the air. I could probably think of a few other quibbles but I'm really not so inclined. As my (unprecedented) 10 out of 10 vote indicates, I want to convey what an amazing achievement this movie is, even in it's truncated form, and whatever issues I may have with Ted Turner, may the movie gods bless him for presiding over this reconstruction. ("Colorizing" the classics, on the other hand...) Bottom line, don't just see this out of a "sense of duty." See it because it's relevant to us now, reminding us that we have choices in life, and those choices have consequences...