von Stroheim can be seen by the camera at the far left
von Stroheim on the set
GREED
A
USA (140 mi) 1924 restored version (239
mi) d: Erich von Stroheim
I never truckled, I never took off the hat to fashion and
held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they
didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it
for the truth then and I know it for the truth now.
—Frank Norris, opening title card from his essay The True
Reward of the Novelist, 1903, which may as well be the voice of the
director
What had become of her husband Trina did not know. She
never saw any of the old Polk Street people. There was no way she could have
news of him, even if she had cared to have it. She had her money, that was the
main thing. Her passion for it excluded every other sentiment. There it was in
the bottom of her trunk, in the canvas sack, the chamois-skin bag, and the
little brass match-safe. Not a day passed that Trina did not have it out where
she could see and touch it. One evening she had even spread all the gold pieces
between the sheets, and had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept
all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch
of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body.
—McTeague, by Frank Norris, 1899
It is rare to see live screenings of Erich von Stroheim
films, and it is equally rare to get young people to sit through a silent
feature, even when accompanied by the artistry of a live piano
performance. When asked how to persuade young people to see a silent film,
writer and film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his recent column from the
winter edition of Cinema Scope, Conspicuously
Absent or Apt to be Overlooked | Jonathan ..., replied, “By saying that
Stroheim knows more about people than Spielberg does — and more than we
do.” Not sure even that would work. Rosenbaum goes on to express
his dismay at the dearth of representation of von Stroheim on DVD, currently
containing less than half his output, and only one film is available on
Blu-Ray. Altogether missing is Rosenbaum’s choice for the greatest
American film ever made (as of January 2016), My
Ten Favorite American Films and Capsule Reviews of ..., which is von
Stroheim’s silent film GREED (1924), the same film singled out by Catholic
newspaper mogul and moral crusader Martin
Quigley, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Hays
Code (Production Code)
in the early 1930’s, who was quoted as saying art must be handled carefully
because it could be “morally evil in its effects,” calling this film “the
filthiest, vilest, most putrid picture in the history of motion pictures,” a
perfect example of how negativity is often more graphically convincing than the
best reviews. Part of the mythology behind the film exists in the artist
himself, who began reconstructing a new persona for himself the moment he
arrived at Ellis Island on November 25, 1909 at the age of 24, claiming to be
the son of Austrian nobility, calling himself a Count, though his accent was
distinctively lower class (according to his agent and Austrian-born director
Billy Wilder), where his father was known to be a middle class Jewish hat-maker
from Vienna. The reasons for his emigration to America were concealed
until after his death, as it turns out he was a deserter from the Austrian
army. Nonetheless he fooled virtually everyone in Hollywood and Western
Europe that he had links to Austrian aristocracy, a ruse he successfully
carried out throughout his lifetime, presumably the greatest role he ever
played. In America he worked as a traveling salesman, moving to San
Francisco and eventually Hollywood, where he surrounded himself with rumors of
a military heritage, proclaiming himself an expert in these matters, which led
him to a job in 1915 as a wardrobe supervisor in charge of uniforms,
responsible for assembling his own costumed “student corps.” According to
one of his biographers, Thomas Curtiss Quinn in Von Stroheim, “Each
morning the von Stroheim ‘student corps’ — all of whom had been subjected to a
German haircut — would ‘fall in’ in military fashion on an open stage and stand
roll call, inspection, and a rehearsal drill.” He was hired as an
uncredited assistant director to D.W. Griffith on BIRTH OF A NATION (1915),
also a production assistant and an extra for INTOLERANCE (1916), claiming “I
worshipped D.W. Griffith the way that someone can worship the man who has
taught him everything, who has lavished the treasures of genius on him without
holding back. He was the greatest of his day.”
Not Coming from a Theater Near You, August 23, 2009, Oh, the Depravity!
The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim - Not ...
Traces of Griffith’s signature style
are present throughout von Stroheim’s work. The presentational mise-en-scene
that privileges both the actor’s expression and the obsessively, painstakingly
detailed sets; poetic (sometimes excessively so) title-cards; idyllic, romantic
interludes that off-set an otherwise realist aesthetic; close-ups that reveal
the character’s soul (for Griffith often signs of purity, for von Stroheim
corruption); and a dexterous use of montage to maneuver around a set, or to
cross-cut different scenes for dramatic effect. Von Stroheim often takes
Griffith’s stylizations to their furthest extreme, strictly adhering to montage
and rarely moving the camera (defiantly against-the-times, as filmmakers were
more and more employing expressive lighting and tracking shots).
But he also learned something else
from the master: a grand, uncompromising vision that no theater or studio could
contain or, more importantly, maintain. Much like Griffith initially planned
for Intolerance, von Stroheim had hoped to show his monumental Greed in
two parts on consecutive nights, something akin to Wagner’s The Ring of the
Nibelung, a series of four connected operas that are intended to be seen
consecutively (though they are often divided and performed individually).
Neither Griffith nor von Stroheim saw this vision of theirs actualized, but
certainly they are two early visions of cinema as a higher art in an age that
still saw the medium as decidedly lower.
As a director renowned for his authoritative, dictatorial
style, with tensions occurring both on and off the set, von Stroheim is also
remembered for his extravagance in budget indiscretions, along with painfully
slow working methods, where studio executives often had to step in before
shooting was finished due to cost overruns. He directed nine films
between 1919 and 1932 but was fired (or replaced) from as many as five of them,
demonstrating an unwillingness or inability to modify his artistic principles,
such as his extreme attention to detail and his insistence on near-total artistic
freedom, where his career as a director was all but finished when he was
prematurely fired working with Gloria Swanson in QUEEN KELLY (1928), which
forced him to return to acting, salvaging his reputation and career through
iconic acting performances in GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and SUNSET BOULEVARD
(1950). To many he is known primarily as an actor associated with a
decorated military past and aristocratic background, but as a scene
constructionist, von Stroheim was far more sophisticated than many of his contemporaries,
using magnificent crane shots, often blending subjective points of view, using
surrealistic flourishes, including Technicolor shots. Obsessed with
portraying characters as realistic, succumbing to their own desires, von
Stroheim is arguably the first director to shoot a feature film on location,
using natural light, displaying an uncanny sense for meticulous detail and
decors, driven by a desire for perfection, using a novelistic approach where
his ultimate goal was to achieve naturalism and believability in the often
exaggerated theatrics of silent cinema. The films of von Stroheim lie in
a cloud of mystery, as not one of his films was ever released to the public in
the manner of his choosing, as all were altered significantly by studio execs
and recut by studio hacks, none more than this film, considered the Holy Grail
of butchered movies with the complete version presumed lost forever, where
generations of cinephiles can only imagine what was originally conceived by the
artist. As much about the legendary story behind the film as the film
itself, GREED belongs in a unique category, as it’s among the most ambitious
efforts never to have materialized onscreen.
Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Guardian, August 31,
2002, Jonathan
Rosenbaum on Erich von Stroheim's Greed | Film ...
Legends about the “complete” Greed
have existed ever since Erich von Stroheim’s film was released in 1924.
Stroheim’s bosses at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer slashed the film to a mere 10 reels,
but the great Austrian director had shot no fewer than 446. In early 1924
Stroheim apparently screened various rough cuts to friends that were about
one-tenth as long, ranging from 47 to 42 reels. Private screenings can be
interrupted for many reasons — projector breakdowns, pauses for meals or reel
changes — but even so, most accounts put the duration of the Greed
screenings at between eight and 10 hours.
The next version Stroheim edited,
said to be somewhere between 28 and 22 reels, still ran for over four hours.
When he asked editor Grant Whytock to produce a still shorter cut — designed to
be shown over two evenings and eliminating one of the major subplots — the
results were somewhere between 15 and 18 reels. This too was rejected by MGM,
which whittled the film down again, adding intertitles to account for some of
the gaps.
The studio burned the footage that
it deleted over 75 years ago; according to Stroheim, this was done in order to
extract the few cents’ worth of silver contained in the nitrate of the
film-stock.
What MGM eventually released
contains the only surviving footage of the film, but in 1999 the American
producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed on video what Greed might have
been. Schmidlin’s main sources, apart from the 10-reel version and a new score,
are Stroheim’s “continuity screenplay” dated March 31, 1923, together with
hundreds of re-photographed stills of missing scenes — sometimes with added
pans and zooms, sometimes cropped, often with opening and closing irises. It’s
a useful and enlightening undertaking that should alter and enhance most
people’s understanding of Greed, and if you believe the hype from Turner
Classic Movies, what has been lost has now been found. However, by necessity it
is a project that is doomed to remain unfinished, since so many scenes were
destroyed.
(In the interests of full
disclosure, I must confess that I was hired by Schmidlin a few years ago as a
consultant on another speculative version of a classic — Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch
of Evil. Schmidlin also invited me to serve as consultant on his Greed
project, but — with regret — I had to decline because he couldn’t afford to pay
me a fee.)
Both before and after Greed,
most of Stroheim’s released films turned a profit, which helps to explain why
he survived as long as he did in Hollywood, despite cost overruns and constant
battles with the studios. Whether any of his own cuts of Greed could
have been profitable is hard to say, but it’s difficult to fathom how Hollywood
apologists can argue that Irving Thalberg was justified in eviscerating Greed
for business reasons, because the movie he released recouped less than half its
budget.
It’s a truism that writers are
among the most neglected creative participants in movies, especially in
relation to actors and directors. Yet a special kind of hell awaits
writer-director-performers when they function as writers, as Charlie Chaplin,
Orson Welles, John Cassavetes and Stroheim all found to their cost. Stroheim’s
authoritarian image as director and as actor left little room for any notion of
him as a writer. Yet it’s mainly as a writer that we can come to any
understanding of what he was trying to accomplish in his films, above all in Greed,
where his only appearance as an actor is a cameo as a balloon seller, which is
missing from the released version.
The 1972 edition of Stroheim’s
screenplay, edited by Joel W Finler and published by Lorrimer, is a slightly
longer adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague than the one
used by Schmidlin; it gives a pretty good idea of the writer-director’s
intentions. Contrary to the absurd legend that Stroheim simply “filmed” Norris
page by page, nearly one-fifth of the plot in this script transpires before the
first sentence of the novel, and much of what follows brilliantly expands or
elaborates upon the original.
Curiously, von Stroheim rejected the idea of coddling movie
stars who were encouraged to dramatically overact onscreen, which did not
endear him to the movie moguls and Hollywood executives who relied upon a
sympathetic star system to generate box office, and instead demonstrated a
passion for authenticity, focused upon the innate emotions involved, writing
flawed characters prone to making poor decisions, victims of their own
mistakes, subject to repressed resentments and dark, uncontrollable
motives. Instead of creating a false Hollywood melodrama that spins its
own alluring fiction, von Stroheim created a grim realism with no stars, no
glamor, and no happy endings, exposing a seamy underside of everyday life that
includes the hardships and pitfalls of living in poverty, enhanced by the use
of actual locations, creating a harrowing and uncompromising vision where money
literally destroys lives right before our eyes in a stark depiction of a man
unable to control his baser instincts. There are few films being made
even today, more than 90 years later, that create such a shattering
effect. Adapted from the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague: A Story of
San Francisco, considered one of the first major naturalistic novels in
American literature, drawing upon Darwinian theories of evolution, such as
survival of the fittest, and the work of contemporary French writers such as
Émile Zola, who helped shape the naturalism
literary movement, suggesting man is a product of his social environment,
where the surrounding forces affect human behavior. For instance, the
influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution were more prevalent for those
living in the filth and squalor of industrialization, subjecting those workers
to harsh realities that would also include poverty, racism, prejudice, disease,
injury, and death. In creating the character of John “Mac” McTeague,
played by Gibson Gowland, he is a hulk of a man known for his virile
physicality, having grown up in the Big Dipper Gold Mining region in Placer County,
California made famous by the California Gold Rush,
where from the outset we see a man struggling to contain the brute within, as
he’s learned to survive by relying upon brute force and his lower
instincts. Viewed as a simple headed but basically good-natured miner,
with a tendency to be overly friendly, especially after a drink, he is composed
of strong and often warring emotions, where primal instincts such as lust,
desire, and greed would often fight for dominance in an otherwise amoral and
indifferent universe around him. What’s unique here is the unflattering
portrait of an archetypal specimen of the human species, as throughout the film
McTeague is viewed more as a symbol who comes to stand for the entire human
race.
While McTeague is an acclaimed novel, it doesn’t
resonate with the same conviction as von Stroheim’s film, as Frank Norris was
the son of a millionaire who started writing the novel in a creative writing class
at Harvard University, where the book is dedicated to his teacher. Von
Stroheim, on the other hand, dedicated the film to his mother (who he adored)
as the epitome of his artistry, adding painfully autobiographical elements of
his own life into the film, where the poverty and physical abuse mirrors his
early years in America and his difficult first marriage. While the novel
takes place over several decades, featuring dozens of characters and subplots,
including lengthy descriptions of the characters and the seedy neighborhoods
where they live, the countless details might be hard to translate to a silent
film, but von Stroheim’s exacting methods more than measure up, making him
ideally suited for the job, as what he was trying to do was put an entire novel
on film, something that was not fully achieved until 1980 with Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s mammoth 15 and ½ hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin
Alexanderplatz. A blistering critique of the American Dream, von
Stroheim centers his film around several dynamic characters, using bold,
larger-than-life performances that project the unrelenting emotions at the core
of this story. McTeague’s life effectively begins in 1908 with the death
of his father (Jack Curtis), who also works in the mines, but is seen as a
cruel, womanizing, and drunken lout, where as the saying goes, the apple
doesn’t fall far from the tree. When first seen in the film, he’s holding
an injured bird in his hand, kissing its head, resembling a gentle giant evoking
moments of tenderness, but when another miner knocks the bird out of his hand,
McTeague savagely throws him off a bridge. Hoping for a better life for
her son, his mother (Tempe Pigott) pleads with a traveling dentist, Dr.
Painless Potter (Erich von Ritzau), who is little more than a con artist,
begging him to take her son along as an apprentice. So McTeague leaves
the mining town where he grew up, and with the $250 dollars his mother leaves
him when she dies, he opens a small dentist practice in a working class area on
Polk Street in San Francisco. While he has few customers, he makes enough
to get by, which seems to satisfy him. With a lone friend in the world,
Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt), an assistant at a dog hospital, the two are
joined at the hip with their destinies entwined.
When Marcus’s fiancée (and cousin), German immigrant Trina
Sieppe (ZaSu Pitts), chips a tooth falling off a swing, he brings her in to
McTeague to have her tooth repaired. While waiting, Trina buys an
underground lottery ticket from McTeague’s cleaning lady, receiving a lecture
from Marcus about how he doesn’t believe in gambling, but only because his
pockets were empty at the time. Putting her to sleep in the dentist’s chair,
McTeague finds himself powerfully attracted to Trina, swooning over her
ecstatically before leaning down to kiss her at one point, arousing animal
instincts, again resembling a brute that has to restrain himself from molesting
her. Claiming he’s in love, McTeague confesses his feelings to Marcus
afterwards, literally begging to go out with her, while entreating her to
return on a daily basis for more dental work, just to have a chance to see
her. Marcus makes a big deal about stepping aside, given ominous weight
by the way the scene is shot, staring out the window of a pub, seeing the foot
traffic of pedestrians before the camera moves further out to an expansive sea
and returning back again, then casually giving her away as one might a new
puppy or an old worn-out shirt, but almost immediately begins resenting
McTeague for intruding into his personal territory. The afternoon picnic
scenes with her German family are priceless, with ill-behaved children running
around unsupervised, with the family almost always seen waving American flags,
as if they’re more American that way. After the engagement party, the
cleaning lady informs Trina that she has won $5,000 in the lottery, news that
Marcus takes badly, thinking that should have been his. When Trina finally
agrees to marry McTeague, oddly taking place in their living room as a somber
funeral procession can be seen out the window behind the preacher, followed by
a family feast of gluttonous proportions, which plays out like The Last
Supper, as her family leaves for Los Angeles, leaving her petrified to be
left alone. Interestingly, McTeague’s wedding present to his wife is a
bird cage with two love-birds, though from her vantage point, seeing the cage
transposed over her husband’s face, the birds are trapped with no hope of
escape. Seen again after the passage of time, the aggressive nature of
the birds picking at each other inside the cage resembles their own marital bickering,
as the lottery money seems to have transformed Trina into an obsessive miser,
hoarding the money and refusing to spend any of it, even if that means the
couple is forced to live in squalor. Soon afterwards, Marcus announces
he’s leaving town, heading for work on a cattle ranch, but this is accompanied
by the imagery of a cat stalking the two fluttering birds in the cage, with
thoughts of devouring them.
Shortly afterwards, McTeague receives official notice from
the State that he’s not licensed to work as a dentist, subject to a hefty fine
and a jail sentence if he persists, which they soon realize is the subtle
actions of Marcus working behind the scenes. Bouncing from job to job,
McTeague has little luck. With little to no money, the marriage
deteriorates quickly, reaching desperate straits when the couple is forced to
sell their possessions. After attempting to reason with her about
hoarding the money, an incident occurs that changes his demeanor. Just
after losing one job, she orders him out the door in search of another,
refusing to give him even a nickel for busfare, forcing him to walk for miles
in a downpour of rain. Of course, he never makes it to the job and ends
up in a saloon instead, where McTeague becomes increasingly violent, literally
ripping any money out of her hands and taking it instead of asking for it,
where they are reduced to a loveless and pitiless existence. Made even
worse are scenes of Trina carefully polishing her gold coins every night,
including abstract inserts of long, scrawny arms reaching for and caressing the
gold. On nights when McTeague is out all night, she even strips naked and
crawls into bed with her coins, relishing the touch on her bare skin.
After a certain point, McTeague never returns home anymore, where Trina gets a
job working at an elementary school scrubbing the floors. On Christmas
Eve, with nothing in his pockets, discovering their wedding picture ripped in
half in the garbage can outside, McTeague breaks into her living quarters and
murders her for the gold, grabbing one of the birds still left in the cage
(which figures in the final sequence), a scene made even more memorable by the
presence of Christmas decorations and two policemen standing outside having a
conversation, but are clueless to what’s taking place. A “wanted
for murder” poster alerts Marcus that McTeague is on the loose, where he joins
a sheriff’s posse going after him, stopping when they reach the desert,
refusing to enter, as those that enter don’t come back alive. Defying the
sheriff, Marcus goes in after him alone, heading into the isolated wasteland of
Death Valley, one of
the hottest locations on earth, where temperatures during the shooting were
reported between 91 and 161° F. Von Stroheim dragged as many as 43 cast
and crew members into the heat of the desert for two months, with no roads or
running water, wrapping the cameras with towels of ice to prevent overheating,
where insurance coverage was denied, the closest town 100 miles away, yet 14
fell ill and returned to Los Angeles, including actor Jean Hersholt who had
daily bouts with heat stroke, losing 26 pounds during the ordeal, suffering
internal bleeding, and was forced to spend a week in a hospital
afterwards. The most memorable shots were filmed during the heart of the
summer in the middle of the day when the sun was the strongest, with the camera
gradually building to longer shots, where the desolate landscape elevates the
extreme gravity of the situation and the steadily out-of-proportion sense of
desperation. From this place they have wandered into, a literal Hell on
earth, there is no retreat and no possible chance of redemption, where the
ultimate confrontation couldn’t be bleaker and more dramatically
oppressive.
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