GREED (1924)

In early 20th century California, McTeague works at the Big Dipper Gold Mine. He's tough but sensitive; when he finds an injured bird and tries to rescue it, a co-worker slaps it out of his hands, and McTeague knocks the guy down into a gorge. From then on, he always keeps a pet bird or two. When an unlicensed traveling dentist named Painless Parker shows up in the area, McTeague's mother, wanting a better life for him, gets Parker to take her son on as an apprentice. In a while, he has his own (unlicensed) practice in San Francisco, and is friends with Marcus, a worker in a dog hospital. Marcus is sweet on his cousin Trina, but McTeague also falls for her, and he kisses her while she's under ether for a tooth extraction. Marcus relinquishes his interest in her and McTeague and Trina get married. When Trina learns that a lottery ticket she bought has won her $5,000, Marcus is angry, thinking that because he gave her up, he missed out on the money, but it turns out that having the money makes Trina greedy. She won't put any of it toward the household, she spends time on her bed polishing her gold coins, and McTeague has to go begging to her for some drinking money. The one thing she splurges on is a large gold tooth sign for her husband's practice, something he's wanted for a long time. Three years later, the two are unhappy, mostly because of Trina's miserliness. When Marcus reports McTeague to the Dental Board for having no license, he has to quit his practice, and his relationship with Trina goes further downhill. At one point, he brutally bites her fingers to get some money, and we're told that this incident, which results in an amputation, arouses a "morbid, unwholesome love of submission" in her (though we never really see how this affects her). On Christmas Eve, McTeague kills Trina and, as a hunted criminal, takes off with his pet bird and winds up in Death Valley, with Marcus hot on his heels. No one gets out of this alive.

Erich von Stroheim made this silent adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague. His cut was nine hours; the studio, MGM, pressured him to reduce it to four, then MGM released it at two hours. I saw the two hour version many years ago and thought it was a great work. Since then, TCM commissioned a restoration of the four hour version. None of the cut footage still exists, but as was done with Frank Capra's Lost Horizon some years ago, film preservationist Rick Schmidlin used production stills and a copy of the script to "restore" two hours worth of story, mostly consisting of subplots that had been totally removed by MGM. The result, despite its good intentions, winds up feeling more like a visual essay about a movie rather than a coherent and engrossing narrative. The subplots are fairly obvious comments on the main plot. One involves a junkman who becomes obsessed with valuable gold plates his wife claims to own; his obsession ruins their lives in much the way that Trina's ruined hers. The other subplot focuses on an older man and women who live next to each other in McTeague's apartment building. The two lonely people pine for each other and eventually pair up with little concern for money; he has money but she doesn't care. This is a dark and depressing story, though Stroheim's inventive camerawork and incident-filled script keeps it from bogging down. The ending is a gut punch, even though we know where it's going. The acting is excellent. Gibson Gowland makes McTeague a brute, but one that we still sympathize with for much of the running time; ZaSu Pitts, known more for comedy, does a similar thing with Trina; at various points, it seems like she might shake herself out of her greed but she never does, and when she's touching her gold and dreaming of money, an almost sexual energy takes her over. Jean Hersholt (of the Oscar's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, which is still given) is good as Marcus, though overshadowed by the leads. If you get a chance to see the 2-hour film, grab it (it's currently streaming on Amazon Prime). The longer version feels padded and enervated compared to it. Pictured are Pitts and Gowland. [TCM]