A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

Gibson Gowland and Jean Hersholt in Greed
McTeague: Gibson Gowland
Trina: Zasu Pitts
Marcus: Jean Hersholt
Maria: Dale Fuller
Mother McTeague: Tempe Pigott
"Mommer" Sieppe: Sylvia Ashton
"Popper" Sieppe: Chester Conklin
Selina: Joan Standing
Zwerkow: Cesare Gravina
Charles W. Grannis: Frank Hayes
Miss Anastasia Baker: Fanny Midgley

Director: Erich von Stroheim
Screenplay: June Mathis, Erich von Stroheim, Joseph Farnham (titles)
Based on a novel by Frank Norris
Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds
Production design: Erich von Stroheim

One of the legendary mutilated masterpieces, Greed isn't one film but several, most of which are lost. The gravest loss would have to be the original 42-reel cut (about eight hours) of the film, which was seen only by a handful of people, several of whom were the first to call it a masterpiece. What we're most likely to see now is the 1999 reconstruction of the film, gathering the scenes that remained after various hands cut it down to about 10 reels (about an hour and 50 minutes) before its 1924 release, which was a critical and commercial flop. After that, the footage deteriorated or was trashed, so the four-hour restored version is pieced out with what remained in various archives along with stills and other archival material. I doubt that anyone other than professional film historians would be willing to sit through more of Greed than that: It's an exhausting experience, not only because of the length but also because Erich von Stroheim's dedication to telling as much of the story in Frank Norris's novel as he could led him into some extraordinarily bleak places. The bleakest of those places is of course Death Valley, where the climactic standoff of McTeague and Marcus takes place -- a sequence that still has the power to astonish even when seen independently of the rest of the film. But much of the bleakness also lies in the characters of McTeague and Trina, especially the latter, whose transformation from sensitive, shy virgin to monster of greed is harrowing -- a reminder that Zasu Pitts, now best known as a comic character actress, was a performer of real skill. The restoration also includes the sordid subplot of the greedy junk dealer Zwerkow and his half-mad henchwoman Maria, which ends in murder and suicide. Balancing that was a sentimental subplot involving the McTeagues' rooming-house neighbors, the elderly bachelor Grannis and the spinster Miss Baker, who don't meet for a long time, even though their rooms are separated by a partition so thin they can hear each other's every move. If the junk dealer subplot serves to indicate the depths of degradation that threaten the McTeagues, the story of the lonely elders helps sweeten the film as they meet and fall in love, using a monetary windfall in constructive ways -- a counterpoint to Trina's miserly hoarding of her lottery winnings. Greed is a fascinating film, but I suspect that the story of its mishandling outweighs any significance it might have had if it had remained intact and coherent.

Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)

Ronald Colman in Random Harvest
Charles Rainier: Ronald Colman
Paula: Greer Garson
Dr. Jonathan Benet: Philip Dorn
Kitty: Susan Peters
Dr. Sims: Henry Travers
"Biffer": Reginald Owen
Harrison: Bramwell Fletcher
Sam: Rhys Williams
Tobacconist: Una O'Connor
Sheldon: Aubrey Mather
Mrs. Deventer: Margaret Wycherly
Chetwynd: Arthur Margetson
George: Melville Cooper

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Claudine West, George Froeschel, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Harold F. Kress
Music: Herbert Stothart

It's a good thing that amnesia is as rare an affliction in real life as it is, because it gives the crafters of melodrama free rein to imagine its effects, such as the case of what might be called "double amnesia" that plagues Charles Rainier in Random Harvest. For not only does Rainer forget who he is once, after suffering shell shock in the trenches of World War I, he then forgets what happened to him during that bout of amnesia after being hit by a taxi and brought back to his senses. That is, having once forgotten that he was heir to a lucrative family business, he now forgets that he wandered away from the asylum where he was being treated and fell in love with Paula, a music hall performer who devoted herself to him as he launched a career as a writer named John Smith -- she calls him Smithy. But plucky Paula learns the truth about her Smithy, goes to business school and learns to be a high-powered corporate secretary, and gets herself hired as Charles Rainier's executive secretary -- all without revealing the truth about that lost passage in their lives. Was ever such nonsense taken seriously? Yes, indeed, because it's filmed through MGM's highest-quality gauze, with Ronald Colman at his handsome stoic best and Greer Garson at her plummiest and dewiest, full of trembling self-sacrifice. It was a huge hit, partly because it hit wartime audiences where they lived: separated wives and husbands, uncertain whether they they would be reunited and made whole again. Today, we can look back on Random Harvest with irony, or view it as a product of a particular period of Hollywood history that will never come again. But it's made with such affection for its improbabilities, which are manifold, that I can't help admiring it.