Greed

A former miner named McTeague (Gibson Gowland) sets up a dentistry practice in San Francisco. He becomes attracted to Trina Sieppe (Zasu Pitts), a woman who has been dating his best friend, Marcus Schuler (Jean Hersholt). Schuler magnanimously steps aside and McTeague and Trina get engaged. When Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, Schuler bitterly regrets having handed her over to his pal and, some time after the marriage, moves out of the city to try his luck at cattle ranching.

McTeague receives a letter from the California Board of Dental Examiners prohibiting him from continuing to practice without a license. Trina believes the letter to be the result of Schuler's treachery. McTeague's practice disappears, the couple slide into poverty, and their marriage disintegrates--a situation exacerbated by Trina's pathological stinginess. When her husband ultimately walks out on her, she is unwilling to draw upon the lottery money she has been hoarding for years and takes a job as a scrubwoman. One day, McTeague comes to her rooms and asks her for the price of a meal. Now insanely obsessed with money, she refuses. They struggle and she is killed. McTeague snatches the lottery money and departs for Death Valley to prospect for gold.

Schuler sees McTeague's face on a wanted poster and determines to hunt him down and take the $5,000 which Schuler believes is rightfully his. When the posse he joins turns back at the edge of Death Valley, he rashly pushes on. After his horse collapses and his water runs out, he finds his man in the middle of the desert. A hundred miles from civilization, without water and horses, the two men realize they are doomed. Nevertheless, a fight over the loot breaks out and Schuler manages to handcuff himself to McTeague before falling unconscious. Chained to a dead man, McTeague helplessly drops to his knees to await his fate.

In 1923, the Goldwyn Company gave Erich von Stroheim the green light to film Frank Norris's gritty and grim novel, McTeague. von Stroheim decided to shoot the entire movie, including interiors, on location. For the duration of the San Francisco portion of the shooting, he required his cast to live in the same buildings in which they were performing. One of these buildings was the actual scene of the real-life murder that had inspired Norris's tale. Later, the GREED company ventured into Death Valley, where they were greeted by temperatures ranging from 91 to 161 degrees. Crew members collapsed on a daily basis, and Jean Hersholt wound up spending weeks in a hospital.

After 198 days of shooting, followed by a year of editing, von Stroheim submitted a nine-hour film to different employers than those with whom he had started. His new bosses, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, ordered von Stroheim to reduce GREED to a more commercially viable length. The director complied with a five-hour version, which was also rejected by the front office. Director Rex Ingram, a friend of von Stroheim's, then had the movie cut down to three-and-a-half hours. Shorter than this von Stroheim would not go. At that point, Mayer and Thalberg took the matter into their own hands and had the film trimmed to a little over two hours. The deleted footage disappeared and has never been found.

Within the discarded seven hours of material were the following elements: extensive interludes from McTeague's youth, including a scene in which his father drinks himself to death; a subplot involving Maria, the servant girl who sells Trina the lottery ticket, and an avaricious junkman; a second subplot depicting the romance between two elderly neighbors of McTeague and Trina; voluminous material tracing the evolution of the McTeague marriage, particularly the happy early years; and much more.

Critical opinion ran the gamut from "[u]ndoubtedly one of the most uncompromising films ever shown on the screen" (National Board of Review) to "[the] filthiest, vilest, most putrid picture in the history of the motion picture business" (Harrison's Reports), with very little in between. How did GREED do at the box office? The bottom line has been blurred by reports of alleged doctoring of the books by Metro's tax people.

If one can define screen realism as the antithesis of escapism, then GREED fully lives up to its reputation as a classic work of realism. But one should not look to GREED for any form of organic, documentarian realism, beyond the film's indigenous sets. von Stroheim might have thought of himself as a pioneer in the objective depiction of undiluted authenticity, but he was actually a moralist, determinist, and social satirist.

No artist committed to capturing slices of life could be as hooked on symbolism as von Stroheim in GREED. Among the picture's most blatant symbols are: a series of birds representing vulnerability and constraint, including a pair of caged lovebirds--a wedding gift from groom to bride--that squabble when McTeague and Trina do; a succession of hungry cats representing pitiless predation; a daily calendar page that all but shouts "13" on the occasion of McTeague's and Trina's first meeting; a player piano that underscores the artificiality of Schuler's renunciation of his claim on Trina; a courtship conducted in a sewerage area; a wedding ceremony that shares the screen with a funeral procession; a screen-filling sponge being squeezed dry as the McTeagues sink into poverty; a shot of the mad Trina (superbly played by Zasu Pitts) "sleeping with" her savings. And surely no work of pure realism would include such a high proportion of grotesques, some of whom, like Trina's bucktoothed cousin, would not be out of place in a Tod Browning shocker.

Despite its unhappy postproduction history, GREED remains a powerful and affecting film. To those with no cognizance of that history, the movie will seem complete, if not the masterpiece it is reputed to have once been. Anyone curious about the uncut version is directed to The Complete Greed of Erich von Stroheim, a book in which cineaste Herman G. Weinberg attempted to reconstruct the lost classic by publishing the original full-length script side by side with hundreds of stills from the film's deleted sequences. (Violence, adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment