silver nitrate notes

Greed and the Eight-Hour Cut

23 dec 2010

Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) was, in its director's cut, ten hours long. MGM, who had inherited the production when Goldwyn merged into the new studio, found the runtime unacceptable. Studio executives took the film away from von Stroheim and cut it to under four hours. Then they cut it again, to under two and a half. The footage von Stroheim had shot in the desert outside Death Valley, the location work in San Francisco that had taken months to assemble, the exterior sequences photographed on actual American streets, all of it ended on the cutting-room floor. The cut footage was destroyed.

What survives is the studio cut. The cinematographer was Ben F. Reynolds (1890-1948), with William H. Daniels (later Garbo's regular DP) on second unit. The photography of what survives is recognisable von Stroheim: deep focus before deep focus had a name, naturalistic interiors lit from windows, exteriors shot in available daylight on real streets in San Francisco's Mission district. The dental office scenes were filmed in an actual San Francisco dentist's office. The crew rented the office for two weeks and shot during evenings while the dentist saw patients during the day.

The famous final sequence in Death Valley was shot in summer 1923 at temperatures over 120 degrees. The cast was reduced to two actors and a small crew. ZaSu Pitts and Gibson Gowland fight to the death over a sack of gold while handcuffed to each other. One of the horses on the production died of heatstroke. Multiple crew members were hospitalised. The footage von Stroheim brought back from Death Valley was, by all surviving accounts, his best work. Most of it is lost.

A 1999 reconstruction by Rick Schmidlin assembled stills, surviving footage, and contemporary documentation into a four-hour version that approximates what the studio cut destroyed. It is not the von Stroheim film. The von Stroheim film does not exist.

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sources
[1] Koszarski, Richard. Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim. Limelight, 2001.
[2] Lennig, Arthur. Stroheim. University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
[3] Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. Doubleday, 1899 (source novel).
[4] Schmidlin, Rick. Notes for the 1999 TCM reconstruction.