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I don't think there can be much doubt that the two most important events in the history of American cinema, aesthetically,
philosophically and spiritually speaking, were:
1) the creation of "Greed" by Erich Von Stroheim
2) The destruction of "Greed" by Irving Thalberg
The mutilated fragments of the film which remain offer a window onto what was very likely the greatest movie ever made
in America and indeed one of the greatest works of art ever created in America.
These fragments certainly represent the most beautiful collection of images ever put on film by an American director --
with their bold synthesis of lyrical elegance and documentary power. Everything that's fine and exciting in Griffith's visual
imagination has been refined into a mature style that Griffith himself never fully achieved.
The theme of "Greed" is magisterial. The film opens with a kind of prologue in the California gold fields --
site of the Gold Rush, where the American dream changed and was codified into an ambition for sudden success, a success founded
in luck. There the older Puritan ideal of steady work over the course of a lifetime gave way to a wilder kind of hope -- the
notion that bold, even reckless enterprise was the road to prosperity.
The seductive glint of gold just within reach of ordinary men and women has inflected American culture ever since -- and
finds expression in our unhealthy sense of intimacy with celebrities and our elevation of Las Vegas as the epicenter of American
aspiration. Even the wise and responsible visitors to that metropolitan mirage in the middle of the Mojave desert, the number
one tourist destination and fastest-growing city in America, are drawn there by the same illusion that made Placerville the
center of the universe in 1849 -- gold, lying there for the taking.
The original tinting of "Greed", which highlighted gold whenever it appeared in the frame, stated the theme
of the film with unapologetic simplicity -- but the theme was so potent, so resonant, that it never descended into facile
metaphor. Gold drives the lives of the characters in "Greed" as surely as it brought the world to California in
the middle of the 19th Century.
It's heartbreaking and infuriating to watch Rick Smidlin's masterful imaginative recreation of the film Von Stroheim was
trying to make -- four hours long, about the length of the last cut of the film done by the director himself before it was
butchered by Thalberg. (Von Stroheim's original cut ran close to nine hours.)
In the reconstruction, with stills filling in for the destroyed footage, we can see the grandeur of Von Stroheim's narrative
scheme and the breadth of his vision. He was trying to create a comprehensive portrait of a certain stratum of American life
-- lower middle-class, urban, spiritually squalid, perpetually desperate. There is no hint of political comment here -- this
is just the world as it is, delineated in a wealth of precise observation that is almost sociological in nature.
It is not the whole picture. Von Stroheim is bereft of sentiment and unconcerned with people who are not ground down in
the machinery of American life. His characteristic misanthropy and sadism color the work, but don't really limit it -- because
his eye is so clear, his insight so penetrating. There has never been a more powerful dissection of middle-class terror --
a phenomenon which is still with us in this age of out-sourcing and down-sizing and corporate America's profound indifference
to the actual lives of its "human resources".
And yet, though not political. the film is radical. The misery and fear and desperation so fiercely portrayed here are
the matrix of America's love of the movies, and now television -- the media of off-work-hours escapism which both distract
us from our lot in life and tempt us with visions of escaping it.
It is said that people don't want "ordinary life" on the screen, and I believe this is true -- ordinary life
is too often grim and boring. But this is not to say that people don't want a brilliant and dazzling and engaging deconstruction
of the assumptions that underlie ordinary life . . . that they don't want to be challenged on the subject of who and where
they are. "Greed" is probably the most profound such challenge in the history of American art.
Irving Thalberg, one of the great villains of American culture, would not have been bothered by this theme in itself.
He was wise enough to know that corporate culture can afford to produce criticisms of corporate culture and profit from the
enterprise -- in much the same way that it profited from the sale of Che Guevara posters in the Sixties and that the Weinsteins
are profiting from "Fahrenheit 9/11". What undoubtedly disturbed Thalberg about "Greed" was its threat
to the systemic nature of corporate entertainment. Wildly original, made without the least regard for the standardized methods
of distribution then being established by the great entertainment conglomerates, "Greed" was a challenge to him
personally -- to his function in the corporation he served. It asked a question -- will movies be made to serve the needs
of those who finance them, or the needs of those who create them and consume them?
The entire motion picture industry had been founded on and defined by the latter model, by way of Griffith and "The
Birth Of A Nation", but the unpredictability of the model could not be countenanced by the bean counters. A line had
to be drawn.
Thalberg was motivated less by the fear that "Greed", in its original version, would lose money, than by his
fear that it would make money -- rendering corporate functionaries like himself irrelevant.
Thalberg was an intelligent man, a man of taste. I am convinced that he recognized "Greed" for what it was when
he saw the cut Von Stroheim delivered to him -- a great work of art, a revolutionary milestone in the history of film, something
which might change everything. The shabbiness at the center of his soul, at the center of the soul of every man who serves
corporate interests before his own, before the interests of his fellow human beings, asserted itself with a vengeance. He
destroyed the film, destroyed the evidence that it had ever existed in its original form, and hoped thereby to avoid the judgment
of posterity.
Enough remains of "Greed", however, to damn him irretrievably in the eyes of posterity -- to convict him of
moral malfeasance on a grand scale. One should never think of American movies, of the art of film, without a shudder of revulsion
at men like Irving Thalberg. He is like the Turkish barbarians who stored munitions, for sound military reasons, in the Parthenon,
and contributed to the defacement of that miracle. The shattered remnants that survived their self-serving acts of vandalism,
wondrous as those remnants are, are also evidence of profound crimes against the human spirit, against the genius of human
culture.
Here's a link to an interesting and informative (if somewhat overly peevish) article by Jonathan Rosenbaum about "Greed"
and the Schmidlin reconstruction:
Fables Of the Reconstruction
GROTESQUE CINEMA
SOME NEW THOUGHTS ON "GREED"
23 JULY 2005
After WWI the American moviegoing public developed a pronounced taste for the grotesque. It produced a kind of genre
of the grotesque, which catapulted Lon Chaney to the first rank of box-office stars -- an extremely unusual development given
that Chaney was a non-comedic character actor. The genre might be compared sociologically to the genre of film noir that
emerged after WWII. It's almost as though the organized mass killing of the two wars opened a window onto the darkest regions
of the human heart, and people had a need to peek into it occasionally, perhaps as a way of processing the horror.
There was also a tremendous vogue for spiritualism after the Great War, perhaps also reflecting a search for ways of processing
the spectacle of so much carnage, or finding an anti-materialist answer to it. Spiritualism and the genre of the grotesque
were counterpoints to the frivolity that also gripped the Roaring Twenties, but they were important and significant counterpoints.
It's impossible to understand the context of Eric Von Stroheim's mutilated masterpiece "Greed" without understanding
these two counterpoint trends in the culture of his time. "Greed" was a very dark film. It incorporated elements
of the Grand Guignol mode that audiences loved in the Chaney vehicles, but it used them for a higher end -- to construct a
sweeping, epic Jeremiad aimed at the materialism of American society. In this aim, it connected with the anti-materialist
sentiments of spiritualism.
It was a radical new formulation to be sure, but it drew on Von Stroheim's profound understanding of his audience. Von
Stroheim is often presented as a renegade artist in the Romantic vein, following his obsessive private vision in spite of
the commercial exigencies of Hollywood -- but this couldn't be further from the truth. He was, in fact, though visionary
and profligate, a consummate popular artist, whose films had done exceedingly well at the box office before "Greed",
and would do so again.
A version of "Greed", mutilated almost into incoherence by the corporate functionaries at MGM, which had taken
control of the film through a merger with the studio that originally financed it, found its way into theaters and made a profit.
This is hard to credit today, given how grim and shocking even the cut version is, but it obviously reflected Von Stroheim's
canny appreciation of the national mood.
There is no way of knowing how a longer cut approved by Von Stroheim might have done commercially, but good reason to
guess that it might have done very well indeed. All of the more lighthearted and hopeful elements of the narrative were removed
by MGM, which would have made the thing less unrelievedly dark, and the majesty of the overall conception along with the sheer
exhilarating brilliance of the filmmaking might well have enraptured audiences enough to keep them in their seats for three
and a half hours.
One thing we cannot say is that the grotesque elements of the film or its anti-materialist passions would have automatically
caused it to fail. Those opinions were simply the self-serving excuses of the corporate thugs who destroyed a great work
of art.
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