Erich Von Stroheim’s GREED (1924)

Published on: October 21st, 2011

Cruelly ironic that a film which pivots on a lead character’s maniacal desire to retain complete ownership of a certain ‘possession’ – $5,000 in lottery-winnings, not an inconsiderable sum in the early 20s – should itself now only exist in severely truncated form, the remainder long-lost beyond any hope of recovery.

As has been well-chronicled, director Erich Von Stroheim’s exhaustively faithful adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague - tracing the career of a bearish, bogus dentist and his lottery-winning wife, who succumbs to an insane form of avaricious parsimony – originally ran no less than ten hours. Greed as it’s most often screened these days runs a mere two hours, though even this studio-abbreviated remnant is not without its longueurs and repetitions – alongside baffling, frustrating gaps of logic and character-development.

Shock-haired, ruddy-faced, horny-handed behemoth Gowland Gibson (a British ex-sailor, from County Durham) makes for an arrestingly unusual – and resolutely dislikeable – anti-hero as the lunkish McTeague. His very physical performance – all cloddishly dominant bulkiness – couldn’t be described as subtle, but it nevertheless holds up much better than ZaSu Pitts’ fatally mannered turn as his gold-hoarding spouse.

Trina McTeague’s jarringly abrupt transformation from tremulous wallflower (Pitts’s standard screen persona, and a major influence on the development of cartoon-character Olive Oyl) to gimlet-eyed crazy-woman is, unfortunately, just one among Greed‘s numerous departures from plausibility – and it doesn’t help that several of her scenes are often stolen by her own bizarre hat-like hair… or is it a hair-like hat? Individual oddball touches such as Trina’s coiffure/headgear retain a surreal, sometimes nightmarish fascination – especially when part of grotesque sequences such as the McTeagues’ stomach-churningly gluttonous wedding-banquet, in which guests gnaw on what look like toothy animal-heads.

And the grimly nihilistic climax amid the cruel white-salt expanses of Death Valley is chillingly bleak – one major character is battered to death almost before our eyes, in a scene whose uncompromisingly graphic violence wouldn’t be significantly surpassed in Hollywood for several decades.

Neil Young
21st October, 2011

GREED : [6+/10] : USA 1924 : Erich VON STROHEIM : 135m approx : {15+/28}
seen 16th October at the Star & Shadow cinema, Newcastle (£5.00) 35mm, with live organ accompaniment