There’s surely no more famous lost film than Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, a silent film made in 1923 and ’24 and released by MGM in mutilated form in late 1924. If you believe the hype of Turner Classic Movies, what’s been lost has now been found–even though the studio burned the footage it cut almost 75 years ago, in order, according to Stroheim, to extract the few cents’ worth of silver contained in the nitrate.
The documents used to construct the new Greed include the aforementioned continuity screenplay and more than 650 stills, all of which Schmidlin came across in the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles when he started researching the film. None of these items is available to the general public. One can get another version of the script edited by Joel Finler and published in London in 1972, and many stills have been published elsewhere, including the 400 stills printed in a book assembled by the late Herman G. Weinberg, hyperbolically titled The Complete Greed (1973). Still, here too we have only a partial guide to what motivated Schmidlin’s major decisions. This is hardly atypical. Similar gaps–and in most cases much bigger ones–exist in the documentation of the major artistic decisions made in virtually every movie. Nevertheless, most reviewers and many viewers proceed to make their judgments as if they knew all the essential data.
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I’ll start with the second question. In August we got a horrendous “realization” of Welles’s unrealized screenplay The Big Brass Ring on cable. The rewrite was so extensive that it bore about the same relation to the original that Sleepy Hollow bears to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”–in fact, it has even less relation to the original. The Tim Burton movie trashes Irving’s plot and characters, but at least it has more or less the same setting. This version of Welles’s script radically changes the plot and characters and the settings: parts of Spain become Saint Louis, and Africa becomes Cuba. What’s left is an embarrassment, even though the filmmakers think they’re basking in Welles’s reflected glory. Now we’re supposed to be grooving on a typical TV movie, RKO 281, about the making of Citizen Kane; it’s based on a poorly researched and intellectually dubious documentary feature comparing Welles with Hearst (which was of course nominated for an Oscar). And we’re supposed to be eagerly awaiting Tim Robbins’s The Cradle Will Rock, a theatrical feature about Welles’s production of a socialist opera that’s also reportedly an ill-considered hatchet job.
I love that phrase “while he was on vacation.” So much for the months Welles spent organizing and directing It’s All True in Latin America, portions of which are now in danger of being lost forever because no one’s interested in raising money to preserve the footage. This was one of the many topics addressed at a four-day conference in Munich in late October on Welles’s unfinished films, which I attended along with Welles scholars from eight countries and two of Welles’s major collaborators, Oja Kodar and Gary Graver. There was also a lot of discussion about the restorations or completions of, among other films, Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, The Deep, and The Magic Show; recent restorations of previously unseen television films made by Welles in the 50s and 60s were also shown and evaluated. The American press, film magazines included, showed no interest in this event, though it has shown a great deal of interest in all the bogus spinoffs–perhaps because only the spin-offs are capable of lining the pockets of American suits. (Fleming also notes that RKO is considering a stage musical based on Citizen Kane and developing an early unrealized Welles script, The Way to Santiago.) Over the years I’ve come to believe that any CEO or journalist who refers to Welles as “Orson” is automatically untrustworthy. Fleming’s story about the new The Magnificent Ambersons is headlined “Orson’s revenge”–reflecting some ludicrous fantasy that a four-hour miniseries based on the script of Welles’s mutilated masterpiece should somehow garner his posthumous approval.
Given this unhappy record, it’s a miracle Stroheim lasted as long as he did as a studio director. But he did because most of his released movies turned a profit. Whether any of his cuts of Greed would have been profitable is hard to say, but it’s difficult to understand how Hollywood apologists can argue that Irving Thalberg was justified in eviscerating Greed for business reasons, given that the movie that was released made back less than half its budget.
Putting it broadly, Old Grannis and Miss Baker represent Mac and Trina’s higher instincts, and Maria and Zerkow represent their baser impulses–a symbolism that’s underscored by Mac’s living in the same boardinghouse as Old Grannis and Miss Baker when he’s starting out as a dentist and his eventually moving with Trina into Zerkow’s abandoned hovel after he loses his practice. Norris uses these supplementary characters and settings the way a painter might use colors, to enhance and echo his main subjects; Stroheim adheres to the same overall principles, yet through the powers of his imagination he makes even more out of them. Contrary to the absurd legend that Stroheim simply “filmed” Norris page by page, nearly a fifth of the plot in the script published by Lorrimer–recounting Mac’s life prior to his arrival in San Francisco–transpires before he’s found eating his Sunday dinner at the car conductors’ coffee joint, the subject of the novel’s opening sentence.
Working on the reconfigured Touch of Evil, I discovered that one couldn’t delete or alter any single shot without affecting everything else, sometimes in subtle and mysterious ways. The same thing has to be true of Greed, and one of the most pronounced pleasures I had in watching Schmidlin’s version was seeing much of the older footage as if for the first time. Again and again I found myself asking of a particular scene, “Did I really see this before?” In every case I had–there’s no new footage apart from the stills and additional dialogue in intertitles–but the extra dialogue often has the effect of giving the old footage a fresh appearance.
