“What a tragedy it doesn’t exist”: the lost masterpiece that cast a shadow over Christopher Nolan’s career
Throughout Christopher Nolan‘s career, the iconic director has always proselytised film history in all its forms. A few times, he has even revealed his enduring fascination with a lost 1924 masterpiece from the silent era that most fans will not have heard of. Indeed, he has even called it a tragedy that the film isn’t widely available today in its original form.
It was 2013 when Nolan picked his top ten films that are part of the Criterion Collection – and cheekily included one which hadn’t been brought into the fold yet. In his tenth entry, he wrote, “Which brings me to Greed, von Stroheim’s lost work of absolute genius. Which is not available on Criterion. Yet. Here’s hoping.”
What exactly is Greed, though? And why did Nolan describe it as a “lost work”? Well, the film is a psychological drama released in 1924 during the silent era. Directed by Austrian-American filmmaker Erich von Stroheim, it was based on an 1899 novel by Frank Norris entitled McTeague. The picture was a massive undertaking, as it was shot entirely on location instead of in a movie studio – a rarity at that time. In addition, von Stroheim shot a mind-boggling 85 hours of footage for his tale of “Mac”, a dentist in San Francisco who marries his best friend’s girlfriend. She subsequently wins the lottery and becomes paranoid, which slowly twists Mac into a money-hungry killer.
Over the course of the gruelling shoot, many cast and crew members fell ill, especially during the two-month marathon of filming the final sequence in California’s Death Valley desert. To achieve his vision, von Stroheim employed some truly innovative film techniques for the time, including using deep focus lenses in his cameras, which resulted in a much larger depth of field than regular lenses. In the editing process, he experimented with montages, something which wasn’t common back then either.
When von Stroheim’s first cut of Greed was finally edited together, it ran to 42 film reels, lasting for eight butt-numbing hours. A special screening of this cut occurred in January 1924, and outside of MGM personnel, it was attended by only 12 people, including writer Idwal Jones, journalist Harry Carr, and director Rex Ingram. According to Joel W Finler’s Greed. A Film, though, they agreed they’d just witnessed the greatest motion picture ever made. They couldn’t even fathom another film being able to top it.
This version of the supposed masterpiece didn’t sit well with the studio, though, nor did 24 and 18 reel incarnations. Von Stroheim and studio mogul Louis B Mayer reportedly got into a screaming argument over the film’s continued diminishment, with writer Jonathan Rosenbaum claiming it only ended when von Stroheim dubbed all women “whores”, and Mayer socked him in the mouth in response.
Subsequently, MGM took total control of the film and tasked editor June Mathis with cutting it even further down to size. Von Stroheim disowned Mathis’ cut of his magnum opus, claiming she had ruined his masterpiece. The compromised two-and-a-half-hour version released in cinemas performed poorly at the box office, making back only half of its reported budget.
For decades, the original 42-reel, eight-hour cut of Greed became the stuff of Hollywood legend. However, all footage of that version has been lost over the years. In 1999, Turner Entertainment managed to cobble together a four-hour cut that combined existing footage with 650 photos of the lost material, which were handed over by the Margaret Herrick Library. While this scratched an itch for enthusiasts, it most definitely wasn’t von Stroheim’s full vision. Thus, the discovery of the film in its initial form is a “holy grail” for film historians. Indeed, Nolan is one of many film scholars who is always pulling for the lost footage to finally resurface.
Some critics have pointed to thematic elements of Greed that Nolan has explored in his own films, such as the murderous paranoia of the amnesiac Leonard Shelby in Memento. However, it’s Nolan’s status as one of Hollywood’s primary custodians of film history that has seen Greed cast its largest shadow over his career.
In 2016, he lamented to The Telegraph, “God, what a tragedy it doesn’t exist. But maybe one day, someone will find it. These things do happen.”
