Rent Greed (1924)

Silent melodrama (with spoilers). - Greed review by Steve

The director initially cut this to a running time of 8 hours and was devastated after MGM bought the studio producing the film and slashed it to 140 minutes. But even the short version is an enormously ambitious work of great social breadth with a well told, complex narrative. It has the expansive, labyrinthine design of a Victorian novel. Greed doesn't carry the impression of being a fragment. It is epic.

 Naturally it is a moral tale on the nature of greed. John McTeague (Gibson Gowland) marries a woman (Zasu Pitts) who wins money on a lottery. But she becomes miserly and suspicious. Her former fiancé (Jean Hersholt) is tormented by the ill fate of missing out on such huge wealth and is consumed by a desire for revenge. McTeague and his wife slip ever deeper into madness and imagined poverty. These aren't archetypes, they are real people, flawed and vulnerable and fascinating. The film has a primal energy.

 Greed is visually magnificent and Von Stroheim unlocks the frame with his depth of field. Unusually for the time, It was photographed on location and there is a palpable impression of early century San Francisco and a strong flavour of its immigrant population. The arduous shoot of the final scenes in Death Valley produced a vivid, stunning climax with McTeague handcuffed to his rival's corpse without water and with his horse shot dead.

 Apart from some clunky visual metaphors, the only real negative to the film is the curiosity of what might have been. The director never overcame his disappointment of the fate of his creation. Which is a shame because what we have is one of the greatest films of the decade. As often seems to happen in cinema, it is a vision of compulsion made by man who was himself an obsessive.