The adaptation racket

Premiering Sunday on Turner Classic Movies (at 8 p.m. EST), in a version more complete than any ever distributed before, "Greed" remains an inspirational piece of moviemaking, putting viewers in a state of agitated enthrallment.

"He can't make small of me!" proclaims the burly dentist McTeague (Gibson Gowland) at the San Francisco saloon-goers who witness his best friend throw a knife at him. Of course, McTeague's buddy Marcus (Jean Hershholt) can make small of him, and does. In "Greed," Erich von Stroheim, deploying streaks of mordant poetry, manages to make his characters small and big simultaneously. He reveals their petty lusts with a hyper-realistic intensity that builds to a naturalistic horror.

Von Stroheim is a master at uncovering creatures of the id, monsters buried inside not only a hulk like McTeague but also his proper, increasingly miserly wife, Trina (Zasu Pitts). Near the beginning, the glib, seemingly happy-go-lucky Marcus introduces Trina, then his girl, to McTeague. In a show of friendship, he even bows out so the dentist can move in on her. But Marcus can't abide the thought of losing the $5,000 Trina wins in a lottery right after she and McTeague clinch their engagement. And Trina's stash becomes her golden calf; she worships it and won't let go of it. (Near the end, she sleeps with it.)

When Marcus sees that he won't be able to guilt-trip McTeague into giving him some of the money (McTeague can't get hold of it himself), he resorts to simple revenge, reporting McTeague for practicing dentistry without accreditation. Thus begins a three-coiled death spiral that culminates in the most appropriate setting imaginable: Death Valley.

Von Stroheim did more than film Frank Norris' 1899 novel, "McTeague," chapter by chapter. He added scenes only implied in Norris' descriptions and flashbacks. The director hoped the movie would be distributed as a special two-night presentation -- but he had produced it for the Samuel Goldwyn Co., which merged with Metro Pictures shortly after he finished what he meant to be his final cut. Irving Thalberg, production chief for the resulting corporation, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, insisted that von Stroheim truncate the film to normal feature length. Open to compromise with his studio bosses (first at Goldwyn, then at MGM), the director himself had reduced and polished his nine-hour-plus first cut, arriving at a print that ran between four and five hours.

But this version, too, proved unacceptable. Von Stroheim asked for help from fellow epic filmmaker Rex Ingram, who assigned editor Grant Whytock to whittle down the running time even further, and Whytock got it down to three and a quarter hours. MGM ignored their efforts, however, and reduced "Greed" to two hours and 20 minutes. Von Stroheim disowned the MGM edition.

Rick Schmidlin, the new edition's producer, who previously spearheaded the re-editing of "Touch of Evil" according to Orson Welles' instructions, has used von Stroheim's script to expand the existing "Greed" with production stills explored via techniques borrowed from Ken Burns' documentaries. The result is astonishingly fresh. This "Greed" reconstructs the grand design of von Stroheim's four-hour cut and goes a long way toward filling it in. Integrating lost subplots and supporting characters and crucial stretches of character development, the partly restored "Greed" conjures a forgotten universe of cinematic possibilities.

Von Stroheim's combination of actual locations (it's a valuable document of the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 20th century), veracious action and novelistic details signals the road not taken to epic film adaptation -- at least for five decades. "Greed" looks ahead to masterpieces like Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" (1963) and Francesco Rosi's "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1979): movies that encompass entire cross-sections of society yet also render character with startling intimacy. In von Stroheim's plan, McTeague, Marcus and Trina occupy the middle of a spectrum encompassing, on one end, the scabrous shared venality of a gold-mad junk dealer and maid and, on the other, the sweetly furtive late-life romance of a veterinarian and his next-door neighbor.

"He can't make small of me!" -- the line McTeague yells about Marcus -- pops up earlier in von Stroheim's version, when McTeague can't describe the seats he wants to buy at the Orpheum Theater and lashes out at a ticket-seller who is trying to help him. "You can't make small of me!" could be the motto for all the embattled characters in this film's chaotic, striving society, where the values that determine a man or woman's worth or happiness are fluid and often elusive. "Love me big," Trina demands -- and this fuller view of the film makes clear that von Stroheim isn't just dealing with greed, but with everything that makes a man or woman feel big, from love and family to career and social status. (One restored sequence depicts Marcus as the leader of a neighborhood improvement society.) "Greed" is an American tragedy because all of Mac's, Marcus' and Trina's dreams degenerate into money.

The intelligence of von Stroheim's and June Mathis' adaptation and the vibrant details of his direction make it easy to accept the segues between moving pictures and illustrations. What's wonderful about this version's structure is that it allows even moments familiar from the cut version to expand in your mind. Seventy-five years of film history pulsate in this movie's frames. When McTeague walks to the street after a money fight with Trina and she sneers at him from the top of the stairs, the slanted, bifurcated composition (complete with ceiling) presages the Orson Welles of "Citizen Kane." The modulated hysteria of Pitts' performance, and von Stroheim's eerie, eloquent portraits of her slumped, defeated figure, rank with Welles' handling of Agnes Moorehead in "The Magnificent Ambersons." Gowland's blend of animal wiliness, slow-burning patience and brutishness suggests the three protagonists of John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" rolled into one. The treatment of desert heat and gold lust recalls that movie, too. And contemporary audiences will think of a thrilling sequence from David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" -- the one in which Lawrence goes back to "the Sun's Anvil" to rescue an Arab warrior -- during the climactic trek through Death Valley, with the inexorable beating of the sun.

I always felt that when James Agee, the greatest film critic of the first half of this century, proclaimed that he loved allegory and symbolism only when they "bloom from and exalt reality," he was probably thinking of "Greed." This restored "Greed" augments the reality of the tale and the allegory and the symbolism of it. The small, grinding steps of Trina's descent into obsession produce prickles of psychic recognition, while the repeated eerie visions of skeletal arms sifting through coins and of a solid-gold dining service glittering in foul seduction bring the story to the plane of parable.

Though Agee never wrote a full-scale review of the film, his essays are replete with references to it. For example, he called Judy Garland's dress in "The Clock" "the most appropriate prop I can remember since McTeague's checked cap." And he paid tribute to von Stroheim and his cinematographers, Ben F. Reynolds and William H. Daniels, when praising the "flexible, sensitive" photography of Joseph La Shelle in "Happy Land" and of Joseph Valentine in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt." In one of the most spectacular accolades in film criticism, Agee wrote that La Shelle's and Valentine's work "takes up the Magna Charta for American films from the cellar corner where it was tossed along with the lost 32 reels of 'Greed.'" This four-hour version provides charter enough.

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