Rent Greed (1924)

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

Erich von Stroheim initially cut this to a running time of 8 hours and was devastated after MGM bought the production studio 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. It doesn't leave the impression of being a fragment. This is epic.

It's a moral tale on the nature of greed. John McTeague (Gibson Gowland) marries the fiancée (Zasu Pitts) of his best friend (Jean Hersholt). When the wife wins big on a lottery, her jilted ex is tormented by the ill fate of missing out on such huge wealth and consumed by a desire for revenge... while she grows miserly and suspicious. The couple slip deeper into madness and imagined poverty.

These aren't archetypes, they are flawed and vulnerable people. It is visually magnificent and the director unlocks the frame with his depth of field. There is a primal energy. It was photographed on location and there is a palpable impression of early century San Francisco and its immigrant population. The arduous shoot in Death Valley gives the film a stunning- and famous- climax.

 Apart from some clunky visual metaphors, the only real negative is the curiosity of what might have been. Von Stroheim never got over the the fate of his creation. Which is a shame because what we have is one of the great 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.