During the late 1910s, Erich von Stroheim was known to film audiences as “The Man You Love to Hate,” thanks to a string of performances as Germanic villain stereotypes in films like The Hun Within (1918). By 1919, though, von Stroheim (who had worked briefly for D.W. Griffith) had started to write and direct the films in which he appeared. His first film, Blind Husbands, demonstrated the skillful editing and careful attention to detail that von Stroheim had learned from Griffith. It also revealed von Stroheim as a relentless perfectionist who stubbornly insisted on bringing his unique artistic vision to the screen. Along with his unsparing themes of sexual and physical degradation, this uncompromising attitude made von Stroheim the man studio executives loved to hate—and nobody hated von Stroheim more than Irving Thalberg. As a production assistant at Universal, Thalberg had fired von Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round (1922). But Thalberg’s master stroke was still to come. In 1924, when the Goldwyn Company merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form MGM, Thalberg became von Stroheim’s boss just as von Stroheim was putting the finishing touches on his fifth film, a nine-hour epic that he had carefully whittled down to a five-hour, two-part masterpiece. Thalberg took the film away from von Stroheim and handed it to editors who had read neither the script nor the novel it was based on. The release version, at just over two hours, is all that remains of von Stroheim’s vision—a series of glimpses of what might have been the greatest film ever made.
“Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end
it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and ugliness.”
- André Bazin, describing von Stroheim’s approach to directing
There are no heroes in Greed. No paragons of virtue, no incorruptible icons of goodness, and certainly none of the gun-toting superhumans that plague Hollywood films today. There are only people, tragically real characters who let their own flawed natures strip away their humanity. Based on Frank Norris’s bleakly naturalistic novel, the film depicts the various effects of the titular deadly sin on three people—a simple man, his wife, and her cousin/ex-boyfriend—after one of them wins a lottery.
John “Mac” McTeague (Gibson Gowland), the closest thing to a hero in the film, is a giant of a man with the curly blond hair of a boy, a man-child capable of extremes of both tenderness and violence. When he finds a wounded bird lying on the tracks at the mine where he works, he gently takes it in his massive hand and kisses it. A moment later, after another man slaps the bird from McTeague’s hand, he lifts the man overhead and heaves him down the steep side of the track. Urged by his father to succeed in life, McTeague learns the practice of dentistry from a traveling dentist and sets up shop in San Francisco, where he befriends veterinarian Marcus Schouler. One day, Marcus brings his sweetheart and cousin, Trina Sieppe (Zasu Pitts), into Mac’s office for some dental work, and Mac is immediately smitten. (The scene in which Mac struggles against his urge to kiss her while she’s unconscious, then gives in to it, foreshadows the lack of self-mastery all three characters will display). After Marcus gallantly steps aside so Mac can woo Trina, the pair are married. The wedding is one of the film’s most famous and memorable scenes. In a high-angle deep focus shot, we see a funeral procession through the window of the house where Mac and Trina are exchanging vows—a powerful image that manages to be funny and foreboding at the same time.
Things begin to go sour after Trina wins five thousand dollars in a lottery. Instead of guaranteeing her happiness with her husband, the sudden windfall makes her so miserly that she steals money from Mac’s jacket while he’s sleeping, and buys three-day-old meat from the butcher. Meanwhile, Marcus becomes envious of Mac—not for marrying Trina, but for cashing in because of her. After a drunken altercation between them in a bar, Marcus leaves town to seek his fortune elsewhere—but not before betraying his onetime friend. A short while later, Mac’s dental practice is shut down by lawyers because he lacks the necessary licence. Jobless and shiftless, Mac turns to booze while his wife grows increasingly obsessed with her still-untapped fortune. Their problems swiftly escalate to madness and murder, leading to a final confrontation between Mac and Marcus in the glaring sun of Death Valley—a confrontation that can have no winner.
Despite cuts that cripple the film narratively and thematically (including the loss of two parallel narratives involving other couples whose experiences bookend the central disintegration of Mac and Trina’s marriage), Greed retains images that hint at the scope and intensity of Erich von Stroheim’s original conception. In keeping with his realist principles, the director shot the film on location in an era when studio filming was the norm. Thanks to the brilliant cinematography of Ben F. Reynolds and William H. Daniels, the locations take on an expressionistic life of their own, from the off-kilter streets of San Francisco to a Death Valley as white as sun-bleached bone. (Jean Herscholt, the actor who plays Marcus, sports a noticeable suntan in the Death Valley sequence; he was reportedly hospitalized after days of shooting in the summer heat.) Other expressionistic touches, like a shot of distended arms grasping at riches, are strange but memorable remnants of lengthy subjective dream-sequences that never survived the studio hack job. But there are some images—Mac pausing on his way downstairs while Trina glares at him from the upper landing; Trina sleeping on bedsheets strewn with her gold, Mac kissing and releasing the bird he has kept in a cage throughout the film; and the final, devastating long shot of Mac and Marcus in the desert—that emerge from the ruin of von Stroheim’s painstaking effort with their emotional force fully intact. Like fragments of a half-forgotten dream, they leave us wanting to remember what the whole dream was like, and sad that we never will.
Von Stroheim’s subsequent films continued to be cut, reshot, and hampered by studio interference. He was fired by producer Gloria Swanson halfway through Queen Kelly (1928), and never completed his last film, Walking Down Broadway (it was retooled and retitled by others to become 1933′s Hello, Sister!). Not surprisingly, he stopped directing films and concentrated once again on acting. Until his death in 1957, he appeared in a large number of films, mainly in Europe. Jean Renoir, who claimed von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives was the reason he became a filmmaker, cast him as Captain von Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion (1937). His final Hollywood appearance, as director-turned-chauffeur Max in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), was ironically his most famous role. His example stands as a pointed reminder that the uneasy alliance between art and commerce has always typified Hollywood.