The most one-timery movie on my list for this series, if we are thinking only of length-related obstructions to a second viewing, is Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed from 1924. Also my oldest film in the series, you won't be surprised to learn.
The version of this movie I saw almost exactly ten years ago, in December of 2016, was one of the longest films I have ever seen: 239 minutes, the result of a 1999 "reconstruction" that was attempting to restore von Stroheim's original vision.
Which it never had any hope of fully doing. Von Stroheim's first cut was more than nine hours long, with most of that footage having been lost -- and of course that was not the version released theatrically. The reconstruction sought to put back some of that material in the form of still photographs, and I found that effect profound. It was one of the primary factors in me awarding the film five stars and a healthy spot within my top 100 on Flickchcart. (It's currently sitting at #95.)
But a viewing of a 239-minute movie feels daunting no matter when you're trying to fit it in. A weekend in the middle of September is better than the heart of Christmas season, as I did in 2016, but it's still not optimal.
But the version of Greed on Kanopy was not 239 minutes. It was 130 minutes.
Interesting.
It wouldn't be the first film in this series that was a different version than the one I'd loved. I saw a longer version of Das Boot a couple months ago, and unfortunately, in that case, the extra length hurt the movie, making many of its set pieces more interchangeable. And that choice was, indeed, dictated by what was readily available.
Now, I wish every movie had exactly one version and there would be no doubt as to its absolute quality. I hate this approach of continuing to revise movies after they've already been released. But with Das Boot I recognized it would make an interesting exercise to see how my love stands up to a different version of the material. I can't control that multiple versions exist, I can only choose how I'm going to engage with them.
With Greed losing nearly two hours of its running time, there was a chance that what I'd loved about it would be severely truncated. But when you watch at least five movies a week, shorter is usually better. Add in the fact that it was easily accessible for free on Kanopy, whereas I'd likely be paying to watch the reconstructed version, and it was easy to give myself a break here.
So this was my first viewing of Greed in which all the images were moving. And I'm glad to say that Greed also works quite well as a conventionally constructed film.
Whatever may have been missing from my four-hour version, and I don't remember that version all that well, it did not feel like an absence on this viewing. As I acknowledged the last time I wrote about it, a lot of the missing material was from sub plots that were only tangentially related to the central narrative. So purely as a streamlined viewing experience, I shouldn't be surprised that Greed did not disappoint. One of the core principles about any sort of narrative art is that you should "kill your darlings," so a more economical version is usually better at least in that respect.
I'd say Greed probably did not have the same impact on me this time, though. That could be the general phenomenon of second-time syndrome, though with my favorite movies, they only exhilarate me more with each viewing. I think it also points to how much of an integral part of the viewing experience I found the effort to reconstruct the original movie.
But the things I remember liking about Greed, I still liked on this viewing -- nay, loved.
What I forgot was that this movie is not actually, primarily, about the greed of the film's protagonist, a decided anti-hero in the form of McTeague, played by Gibson Gowland. We meet McTeague when he's throwing a man down the side of an embankment in a gold mine, which isn't fatal for the victim but which showcases McTeague's miserable temperament. McTeague is also weak, as he later kisses his future wife while she's a patient in his dental chair and while she's unconscious. So not only is he weak, he's also rapey.
However, he doesn't seem to be particularly greedy. In fact, for a time in the middle of this movie, he mostly seems to be doing the right thing, trying to make an honest career as a dentist and do the right thing by his future wife, after the initial transgression that she doesn't even know about. The fact that his future wife, Trina (Zasu Pitts), wins $5,000 in the lottery isn't a factor in his decision to propose to her, as it occurs after they are engaged but before they are married.
No, it's her who has the Scrooge McDuck tendencies. She doesn't have enough gold coins to try to swim in them, but she does frequently visit them and go wild-eyed with obsession over them. There's even a great shot where you only see her arms, looking skeletal and gnarled, allowing the doubloons to sift through her finger.
What Trina displays goes beyond greed. As the text says at one point, it's almost like a mental illness. She's unwilling to spend almost any of the $5,000, even when it sends her to scrubbing floors at a local kindergarten. But you sense it is almost a paranoid sense of miserliness more than actual greed, though I suppose they might be two sides of the same coin. Someone who is truly "greedy" fixates on the acquisition of more wealthy, not necessarily the extreme protection of the wealth she has. However, the damage it does to their relationship, and their lives, makes whatever it is perhaps even more pernicious than greed.
I was thinking about how this film deals with many if not all of the deadly sins, beyond just greed. Envy is hugely at play here, as the film's third most important character, Marcus (Jean Hersholt), comes to greatly regret his initial generosity in stepping out of the picture so McTeague can marry Trina. See, he was originally dating Trina, and it was McTeague's heartfelt confession of his love for her -- based on sexually assaulting her in the dental chair (though Marcus doesn't know that) -- that caused him to magnanimously make way for his friend. He may not have truly loved her, otherwise he wouldn't have given her up so easily, but after she wins the lottery, he becomes increasingly miserable until he morphs into McTeague's main rival and antagonist.
There's also a bit of sloth. After McTeague loses his dental practice due to not having attended an accredited dental school, he loses all ambition and becomes a total layabout. It's at this point that his inclination toward the drink starts to turn him into a truly miserable character after he'd spent an hour of screen time fighting his instincts and doing better than that.
Pride, gluttony, wrath and lust are in there as well. Gluttony really only has one showcase, which is at the wedding scene where the characters are seen stuffing their faces and the text even talks about them gorging themselves. Wrath? Well, McTeague is wrath incarnate, even if he sometimes gets it under control. We know about the lust, of course, that caused him to kiss Trina while she was sleeping. Pride is the hardest one to specifically pull out, but it is probably also the most generic of the seven deadly, applicable as you choose to apply it.
It's interesting to me that my inclination is to talk more about its story than the film's technical merits on this viewing. But I found many of the shots quite profound, as von Stroheim has a good instinct for framing and for the use of lighting. The close-ups are confronting in the way you want, and he even has a knack for some symbolic imagery, such as when he intercuts scenes of a cat waiting to pounce on McTeague's birds in their cage as a metaphor for one character trying to attack another.
The only thing I found worse this time was the performance of Zasu Pitts. In my previous post about Greed, I talked about how the performers weren't "playing to the back of the theater." That wasn't my impression of Pitts this time. She widens her eyes at the drop of a hat, almost as though she thinks she's about to be eaten by that cat. When this is in reaction to monstrous behavior by McTeague, it makes sense, but there are a lot of points where it seems to totally unmotivated. In fact, if I were seeking a motivation, it would be to play to the back of the theater.
And to finish with just one more story bit: The climax in Death Valley is as arresting as it was last time.
I feel like I could say more about Greed, but great films are like that. If I want to watch it again, I'm glad to know I have a very acceptable shorter version I can watch without having to set aside an entire weekend to watch it.
In October I will be watching Edward Zwick's Glory, my #90 on Flickchart.
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