Greed (Von Strohiem, 1924): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12.50pm
This 35mm presentation (also screening on May 14th) is part of the Big Screen Classics season. Full details here. Today's screening will include a live piano accompaniment by Costas Fotopoulos.
Chicago Reader review:
Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic is more famous for its original
eight-hour version than for this cut that MGM carved out of it (though
apparently there were several prerelease versions, which Stroheim
screened privately for separate groups). The studio junked the rest of
the footage, and apart from a reconstruction cobbled together recently
with production stills and the shooting script, the release version is
all that remains today. But even in its butchered state this is one of
Stroheim’s greatest films, a passionate adaptation of Frank Norris’s
great naturalist novel McTeague in which a slow-witted dentist
(Gibson Gowland) and the neurotic woman he marries (the great ZaSu
Pitts) are ultimately destroyed by having won a lottery. Stroheim
respected the story enough to extend it imaginatively as well as
translate it into cinematic terms, and he filmed exclusively on location
(mainly San Francisco, Oakland, and Death Valley). Greed remains one of the most modern of silent films, anticipating Citizen Kane
in its deep-focus compositions and Jean Renoir in the emotional
complexity of its tragic humanism. Jean Hersholt costars. Essential
viewing.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is an extract.
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