Gordon Gecko was Wrong

Film: Greed
Format: Internet video on laptop.


The first cut of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed was nine and a half hours long. Roll that around in your head for a minute. If you assume a 15 minute intermission every two hours, you could start watching it just after breakfast and finish just after dinner. I can’t for the life of me understand why someone would make a film that long, and I’ve watched all three of the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings in the same 24 hour period.

Naturally, the released version was considerably shorter, coming in at about 140 minutes. Naturally, von Stroheim had a conniption, claiming that the studio had butchered his heartfelt work needlessly. And so, multiple versions of the film have flitted around, with the 140 minute version being (for some time) the most common and the most maligned. A few years ago, a “restored” version showed up using stills and similar shots to replace some of what was lost. This version clocks in at about four hours.

All of this leaves us, the viewers, with something of a quandary. The four hour version by all rights is greatly superior to the butchered version. But, watching what amounts to an hour and forty minutes of still pictures is not unlike sitting through watching someone’s vacation photography. Suffice it to say that things are much easier on the eyes and the brain when there’s movement on the screen.

Anyway. As the title of the film indicates, the plot here is all about greed in its many and various forms. A guy named McTeague (Gibson Gowland) is apprenticed to a dentist, sorta. He’s apprenticed at least to a guy who claims to be a dentist. And he takes to the work. Eventually, he goes off on his own and sets up a practice in San Francisco. It’s here that he meets Marcus (Jean Hersholt), and the two become friends. This lasts only until Marcus’s cousin Trina (the awesomely named Zasu Pitts) arrives, and the two men fight for her affection.

McTeague comes out on top of that battle, and Marcus is a good sport up until the moment that Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery. At that moment, Marcus decides that he shouldn’t have given up on wanting to marry Trina. But all is not well. Trina, it turns out, is a complete miser, and she refuses to do anything with her money except horde it. McTeague eventually loses his dental practice because of Marcus’s machinations, but still Trina will not allow them to use “her” money to survive, and McTeague is forced into work as a laborer and the two live in poverty.

And then the trouble really starts. McTeague leaves, but eventually decides that he wants that money, and decides to kill his wife and inherit her wealth. This will concern us for quite some time with this film.

This is hardly a new story, of course. It’s a classic tragedy in which everyone has the same tragic flaw—a desperate love of money. The support characters suffer from the same basic problem, too. Throughout, characters make decisions based strictly on wealth and the desire for wealth, often choosing the specifically wrong thing because it offers a chance at cash. There’s nothing wrong with telling a simple story or telling an old story. It’s just that this particular story doesn’t require four hours to tell it, let alone von Stroheim’s original mindboggling 9 ½ hours.

There are some other things here that irritate me beyond the length, much of which could have and should have been cut. For instance, a great deal of the intertitles are written in dialect, which is painful to get through. Trina’s parents, for instance, are Old World German, so we get dialogue like, “…pe vairy goot to her…von’t you?” I don’t see that that enhances the story in any way. It makes me pause and try to interpret, and I don’t want to have to do that. I just want to watch the damn story.

The shame of it is that Greed could well be a fascinating story. There’s a certain level of strange, goggle-eyed fascination that comes with people who have the resources to do anything they’d like but are unable to spend a dime without purpose. Trina at the very least should be someone we want to know more about. The film goes there at times, showing her polishing her money and admiring it, for instance, but the long running time doesn’t offer nearly enough to satisfy, instead dealing with subplots of other people torn apart by the insane desire for cash.

It occurs to me after spending multiple hours watching von Stroheim’s directorial work on the screen that he was very much enamored of the idea of his own artistic vision, and damn the cost. But it also seems that his concern was with his own image as a director, and damn the cost of that even more. Greed gets part of the way there, but seems to be sunk under the weight of its director's enormous ego.

Why to watch Greed: The height of von Stroheim’s skill as a director.
Why not to watch: At less than half its original length, it’s still way too long.

More Like Foolish Director

Film: Foolish Wives
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

A number of other 1001 Movies bloggers are quite a bit brighter than I am. That goes without saying. Specifically, though, they are smarter than I because they made a concerted effort at the beginning of their personal quests to watch all of the silent movies right away. I have not been nearly that smart, although as of late I have been trying to rectify that. This is my fourth silent film in the last week, and there’s at least one more coming pretty soon.

Foolish Wives comes out of my personal collection. I found it a few months ago in a resale shop for a couple of bucks and picked it up because I recognized the name. That may have been a mistake—I don’t know if this film is in the public domain, but I’m sure I could have found it elsewhere and spend those couple of bucks on something I’d have enjoyed more. Another movie, perhaps, or a couple of burritos. Several times in the past I have watched a film and thought to myself, “I am watching this…why?” In this case, the question is, “I paid money for this and am watching it…why?”

I can’t really tell you why I spent time with this film. I have three layers of complaints. We can start with the easy layer first. The history on this picture suggests that von Stroheim’s initial film ran something along the lines of eight hours. When confronted by his studio as to how people could reasonably watch this in an evening, von Stroheim is alleged to have commented that the film was perfect, and presenting it to an audience wasn’t his problem. I have to wonder what the man was thinking—the film barely sustains a length one quarter of that. Be that as it may, the film has been chopped a number of times; there are versions running past the three-hour mark and one running less than 90 minutes. It is what it is.

The second layer of complaint I have is specific to the version I watched. It’s a punishing DVD, with only six scenes, each one relatively equal in length. The scene breaks are less natural pauses and more places selected arbitrarily, with a new “scene” starting in the middle of a title card or an actual scene. It can’t be that difficult to break this up into actual segments, can it?

Further, the music selected for this version of the movie is ridiculously bad in terms of matching up with the story. It’s almost as if someone merely selected music based on length rather than mood. If the film is legitimately as great as its press clippings, then someone should take the time to write an actual score for it. The action on screen rarely matches the music cue. At one point, the main character’s maid is crying, and the music is a lighthearted dance played by a string quartet. Earlier in the film, we get a massive orchestral hit when a man picks up the phone to order a room service breakfast.

Additionally, the print is quite muddy in spots and rough. Again, if the film is so great and so important, why hasn’t anyone bothered to remaster it? There are splotches and blotches, speed ups and slow downs, fuzzy spots, and a few place that look quite a bit like the film was impressed with an imprint of burlap. All in all, this makes for a painful viewing experience. I can live with that if the film is worth it, but it certainly affects my opinion and the overall experience. I try to remain conscious of such problems, but there is only so much I can do to prevent myself from being swayed to the negative by such carelessness as the mismatched music.

The top layer of problems here are the ones that can’t be explained away with the director’s alleged megalomania or the decisions made by the producer of this disc. Bluntly, this movie is dull, dull, dull. We have Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin (von Stroheim), late of the Russian aristocracy. He lives in Monte Carlo with his two “cousins, Olga (Maude George) and Vera (Mae Busch), in an opulent style that the trio cannot hope to afford and that includes freakishly long cigarettes. They receive counterfeit money from a man named Ventucci (Caesare Gravina) and otherwise survive by bilking the wealthy and gullible. The Count, who goes by Sergius, romances married women for their cash, and the women attempt to do the same thing to the men.

A new chance for them becomes available when an American ambassador named Hughes (Rudolph Christians) and his wife (Miss DuPont) arrive from America. Sergius immediately sets to work on winning here and then providing a sob story about a debt of honor that needs repayment. Meanwhile, Hughes is suspicious of the man he has heard is an inveterate womanizer and con artist. The trio’s maid Maruschka (Dale Fuller) also loves the Count, and will do anything to win him over.

That’s the whole plot. I have no idea how that could have possibly sustained 480 minutes of footage, nor how anyone could have watched that much of what is often quite amateurish.

Sergius’s plot for getting money appears to be acting charming, and then asking for cash. This is a tactic that evidently works not only on bored wives, but also on the wives of ambassadors and homely, skull-faced maids. Sergius is shameless and wanton, which is great, but his shamelessness and wantonness comes in service of a bland story blandly told. The title cards, written in a way to evoke excitement, fail miserably. Part of this stems from the style of the cards. Everything is—written—with dashes—spaced—throughout—evidently to generate—more interest—in what’s—going on. (Now go back and read that like Shatner!) At times, the film is so dialogue-heavy that minutes are spent reading with brief flashes of the characters mouthing the same words.

There are a couple of things that work, and a few good jokes. I like that our criminals are Russian and that Sergius evidently really is nobility and a former soldier. It makes sense that he would be in Monte Carlo, as he no doubt fled Russia after the revolution a few years earlier. That’s effective and interesting, and while nothing is really made of this, it’s easy to think that this is precisely what von Stroheim (who also wrote the film) intended. There’s a nice joke in the middle when we discover that Mrs. Hughes is reading a book called Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim.

But a good little joke and some smarts do not a movie make. Or they do, but they sure don’t make an interesting one. I’d be willing to watch this again with a cleaned-up version and an actual score that fits the action. But at the same time, I think that if this film really was so important to the canon, someone would have scored it and remastered it already.

Why to watch Foolish Wives: You have time to kill.
Why not to watch: There is virtually any other movie to watch or thing to do.