Spiritual Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on Greed and Unconcern for God)

“If it be the case with you that you let others preach and teach and exhort as they will, and you go along, thinking that you have enough, and live in style; never ask whether you are doing right or wrong by your neighbor, if you only have your own, and make your calculation so that with one penny you may gather two, yes ten, and have no concern about God's word and preachers, and about the world with its laws, then you can also understand that your treasure is not above in heaven, but remains with the moth and rust; so completely, that you would rather anger God and the world before you would lose a penny, and give up anything for its sake: as now peasants, citizens, noblemen everywhere shamelessly talk and live, who for the sake of a penny venture to dare defy the government of God in the Church and in the world, so that this saying may remain true and practically convict them, since they will not hear nor be instructed. For it cannot be otherwise, even if we worry long about it and would gladly see it otherwise. Therefore it is best, if we have told it to them, that we let them go their way, and despise and laugh at them as much as they do at us. For God says in the second Psalm that he can laugh too, and laugh so that they will have bitter weeping; that means that he will speak with them in his wrath and will alarm them in his sore displeasure.”—German Protestant theologian and hymnwriter Martin Luther (1483-1546), Commentary on The Sermon on The Mount, translated by Charles A. Hay (1892) 

A (Sort of) Appreciation: John Steinbeck’s ‘The Pearl’

Few works of fiction left so little impression on me in my adolescence as The Pearl. In no small way, in its simple style and obvious symbolism, the 1947 novella by John Steinbeck reminded me of another short work of fiction: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

The reaction of Steinbeck’s contemporaries, as summarized by the Nobel Prize laureate’s biographer Jay Parini, could also have applied to Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize winning book: “naïve” and “simplistic.”

Quickly dismissing both books, I thought little about them for many years, especially after reading longer, more complex works of their creators—erven though, over time, I would continually see them in bookstores and libraries because of their presence on high school or young adult reading lists.

But, re-reading The Old Man and the Sea about a decade ago, I found numerous passages that reminded me of why I was drawn to Hemingway at his best: lean, pure, powerful prose. Similarly, Steinbeck’s empathy for the common man and bone-deep familiarity with their work routines and aspirations for a better life—undoubtedly developed in hours of manual labor in childhood, youth and early adulthood—shine through so much of The Pearl.

At heart, both authors were consciously striving to answer their critics by demonstrating that recent mediocre work did not mean that their best days as writers were behind them, that fame and success hadn’t softened them. At the same time, they transformed their naysayers into malign forces threatening their principal characters (interestingly enough, Latino males who become stand-ins for their creators’ creative midlife crises).

Hemingway’s humble Cuban fisherman Santiago finds himself beset by sharks as he hauls back a marlin, the biggest fish he’s ever caught. Steinbeck’s Mexican-Indian pearl fisherman, Kino, must deal with his fellow villagers, all of whom want a piece of his expected wealth from discovering a priceless pearl, —with some even plotting to kill him for it.

Like other writers who produced prolifically while constantly challenging themselves, Steinbeck’s output could be uneven—marked by highs (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden) and lows (The Wayward Bus), with his energy often dissipated by outside projects such as film work.

But, if The Pearl doesn’t possess the power of, say, Of Mice and Men, it tells a simple story vividly, with the timeless force of a Biblical parable.

The novella centers on Kino, who, despite his poverty, has lived happily in a hut in a rural village of La Paz in northwest Mexico, with his wife Juana and baby Coyotito.

Then a scorpion stings Coyotito, and though Juana sucks out the poison, the wound keeps swelling, forcing the family to seek emergency medical attention to save the boy’s life.

What I didn’t notice when I first read The Pearl around 45 years ago—but what struck me with full force now—was Steinbeck’s deep compassion for Kino and Juana, who yearn for the freedom from insecurity enjoyed by Anglos. It comes to the fore when the fisherman goes to seek help from a white doctor:  

“This doctor was of a race which for nearly four hundred years had beaten and starved and robbed and despised Kino's race, and frightened it too, so that the indigene came humbly to the door.”

The doctor, stout to the point of caricature because of his greed (“His voice was hoarse with the fat that pressed on his throat”), won’t attend to the baby without payment.

A miracle seems to present itself when Kino comes upon the pearl. But it’s not just any valuable object: it’s a giant “Pearl of the World.”

When Kino celebrates his good fortune by dressing to show off, it shifts the entire social fabric around him, because it enters “into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers of everyone, and the only person that stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy.”

No wonder that “All manner of people grew interested in Kino—people with things to sell and people with favors to ask.”

What had been a basic use of the money that could come from the pearl—just enough to save a life—has rapidly degenerated into the community’s greed and Kino’s paranoia about protecting his treasure.

Several aspects of this tale made me remember what a compelling voice Steinbeck was for me when I first read him as an adolescent:

Nature: Steinbeck was enthralled by California’s rivers, coast, and farms from an early age, and his novels frequently reflect this sense of awe in the presence of the environment and how it interacted with its inhabitants, as seen in this passage from The Pearl: “The dawn came quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of fire as the sun arose out of the Gulf. Kino looked down to cover his eyes from the glare. He could hear the pat of the corncakes in the house and the rich smell of them on the cooking plate.”

Sympathy for the underprivileged and marginalized: Steinbeck did something fairly daring for his time—put at the center of his narrative not just the kind of “forgotten man” so often found in fiction beginning with the Great Depression, but a Latino. Even more so than today, a member of such a group would have been dimly understood, at best, by Anglos. Having traveled to Mexico many times—and encountering so many immigrants from Mexico in the Thirties and Forties—he could render their struggles with great understanding.

Toxic masculinity: Women can bring shake and shatter men with their seductiveness in some Steinbeck novels (Of Mice and Men, East of Eden), but more often they stabilize families grown unexpectedly shaky by the weakness of men. In The Pearl, he dissects how false dreams lead men to abuse their partners—specifically through Kino, whose fury at the sensible Juana results in physical brutality, expressed through similes with Biblical overtones: “Kino looked down at her and his teeth were bared. He hissed at her like a snake, and Juana stared at him with wide unfrightened eyes, like a sheep before the butcher.”

A keen grasp of communal psychology: Although a diverse city has so many different components that it is hard to ascribe a particular characteristic to it, a small community is different, as Steinbeck expertly conveys. Perhaps because of his long friendship with marine biologist Ed Ricketts, he realized that towns like Kino’s were like organisms:

“A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.”

Will The Pearl continue to maintain its place on today’s high school reading lists? It might. An article in my local newspaper, The Bergen Record, made me roll my eyes when teenagers offered their opinions on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (narrator Holden Caulfield was too “whiny”) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (“boring”).

However, The Pearl seems to have escaped much of this groaning. It offers a character that many minority and underprivileged students find recognizable from their own backgrounds. 

Moreover, it conveys a lesson that youngsters of all backgrounds should learn—and adults from all walks of life should be reminded of: the most priceless things in our lives are what sustains our spirits rather than what fills our bank accounts.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Selfishness and Greed)

“I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or … or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to take from us the crust.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Chrysostom, on Greed, an ‘Unrestrainable Frenzy’)

“Now tell me why is wealth an object of ambition?.... To the majority of those who are afflicted with this grievous malady it seems to be more precious than health and life, and public reputation, and good opinion, and country, and household, and friends, and kindred and everything else….Nor is there any one to quench this fire: but all people are engaged in stirring it up, both those who have been already caught by it, and those who have not yet been caught, in order that they may be captured. And you may see everyone, husband and wife, household slave, and freeman, rich and poor, each according to his ability carrying loads which supply much fuel to this fire by day and night: loads not of wood or faggots (for the fire is not of that kind), but loads of souls and bodies, of unrighteousness and iniquity. For such is the material of which a fire of this kind is wont to be kindled. For those who have riches place no limit anywhere to this monstrous passion, even if they compass the whole world: and the poor press on to get in advance of them, and a kind of incurable craze, and unrestrainable frenzy and irremediable disease possesses the souls of all. And this affection has conquered every other kind and thrust it away, expelling it from the soul.”—Father of the Eastern Church and Bishop of Constantinople St. John Chrysostom (345-407), “No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Harm Himself,” translated by W.R.W. Stephens, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 9, edited by Philip Schaff (1889).

I wish that a picture of the eloquent preacher who said these words, St. John Chrysostom (the surname means “golden-mouthed”), would interest people enough to read these words. But I’m afraid that an illustration of a figure from nearly two millennia ago is not someone to capture the attention of a 21^st century reader.

So, I thought I would use an image likely to be more familiar to the common reader—or, at least, film fans, since mass entertainment is the unlikely modern equivalent of the ancient parable.

So, in case you are wondering: yes, that is director John Huston, in a role he took on increasingly on in the last two decades of his long Hollywood career—actor—facing Jack Nicholson (back to the camera, in shadow), in the great 1974 neo-noir classic, Chinatown.

Huston’s character, a jovial-seeming industrialist called Noah Cross, is one of the great villains of movie history. The name itself is ironic: read one way, it suggests an Old Testament patriarch, along with New Testament redemptive qualities.

But as Nicholson’s private eye, Jake Gittes, discovers, this figure is behind the massive diversion of water from farms to Los Angeles. And the “Cross” surname might as well be short for “double-cross,” for few evils are beyond this magnate’s thirst for money, including municipal corruption, murder and child molestation.

In one of the most striking exchanges in Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning screenplay, Gittes probes for the motive behind all this, asking Cross, “How much are you worth?”

Cross: “I have no idea. How much do you want?”

Gittes: “I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million?”

Cross: “Oh my, yes!”

Gittes: “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?”

Cross: “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.”

Beware of a pursuit of wealth so frenzied that it mortgages the future of society, the film tells us. It does indeed become what Chrysostom cautioned of: “a kind of incurable craze and unrestrainable frenzy and irremediable disease [that] possesses the souls of all.” 

Or, as Gittes warned in Chinatown's climax, about the poisonous influence of Cross: "He's rich! Do you understand? He thinks he can get away with anything."

Quote of the Day (Ben Jonson, on the ‘Fine, Elegant Rascal’)

“I fear, I shall begin to grow in love

With my dear self, and my most prosperous parts,

They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel

A whimsy in my blood: I know not how,

Success hath made me wanton. I could skip

Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake,

I am so limber. O! your parasite

Is a most precious thing, dropt from above,

Not bred 'mongst clods, and clodpoles, here on earth….

I mean not those that have your bare town-art…

But your fine elegant rascal, that can rise,

And stoop, almost together, like an arrow;

Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star;

Turn short as doth a swallow; and be here,

And there, and here, and yonder, all at once;

Present to any humour, all occasion;

And change a visor, swifter than a thought!”—Ben Jonson, Volpone: Or, The Fox (1606)

A bitterly funny playwright, Ben Jonson—born on this date in 1572—would probably say a lot of cynical things about why, though far more learned than his slightly older friend and contemporary William Shakespeare—and a greater literary celebrity in their lifetimes—his work is far less well-known and read than the Bard’s today. He’d probably start by noting mordantly that, if that’s the case, how come the facts of his life are so much better known than Shakespeare’s? “You don’t see people claiming that the Earl of Oxford wrote my plays and poems,” he’d say, deep in his cups at some pub.

(The shadow cast by Shakespeare seems even more difficult to fathom when considering Jonson's tumultuous life: Let's see--a twentysomething soldier, a graduate of his nation's finest schools, who goes on to become a hard-drinking, wenching guy who ends up in legal trouble because of a violent incident, then puts himself front and center in his works. Who ever knew that Norman Mailer time-traveled?)

In an essay on Jonson in his work of criticism The Sacred Wood (1921), T.S. Eliot—himself subject to the changing tides of academic approbation—identified the problem as “the most perfect conspiracy of approval”: “To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries.” There was really only one way to rescue him from this dilemma: “[I}n order to enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament, and …see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our London: a more difficult triumph of divination.”

At this juncture, seeing Jonson through early-20^th-century London is a conceptual leap. But we don’t have to look that far. In Volpone, his satiric masterpiece of greed, we can see a clear through-line to Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Kenneth Lay, and Bernie Madoff.  Jonson would have scoffed at the idea that some regarded greed as gold. No, he’d correct you: like his elderly Venetian title character, they regarded gold as a secular religion to be worshipped unashamedly.  

Modern screenwriters and playwrights have regarded Volpone as rich with action and insight into human behavior. Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted it for his 1967 film The Honey Pot, while Larry Gelbart of M*A*S*H fame alluded to it as his inspiration by borrowing and transforming the subtitle: Sly Fox (1976). Even the master-parasite dynamics present between Volpone and his servant Mosca (translation: “fly”) are reproduced between Burt Lancaster’s power-hungry Gotham columnist and Tony Curtis’s hustling small-time press agent in the 1957 cult classic Sweet Smell of Success.

The “Quote of the Day” comes from the Mosca soliloquy that begins Act III. The first seeds of the capitalist system take root not merely in the merchant class holding sway already in Venice and emerging in London, but more broadly, in a philosophy of secular humanism that Jonson is eyeing suspiciously. Mosca, a man on the make, is unmoored from considerations of family (he's “dropt from above”), honor or religion (“like a subtle snake” is as obvious an illusion to the Garden of Evil as you can get).

Freedom and individualism, Jonson is saying through this theatrical mouthpiece (attractive, despite his amorality, because of his sheer energy), offer more than just the opportunity to improve one’s circumstances. They open avenues to anyone willing to use words to alter the appearance of situations, to lie, to cheat on a grand scale.

Jonson’s Volpone and Mosca, then, are more than T.S. Eliot’s contemporaries; they are ours, too, every bit as much as Jonson was of the more celebrated Elizabethan, Shakespeare.

Quote of the Day (Anna Hempstead Branch, Warning of the “Magic of the Coin That Sings”)

“Oh, when we speak, Great God, let us speak well.
Beware of shapes, beware of letterings,
For in them lies such magic as alters dream,
Shakes cities down and moves the inward scheme.
Beware the magic of the coin that sings.
These coins are graved with supernatural powers
And magic wills that are more strong than ours.”--Anna Hempstead Branch, Sonnets From a Lock Box and Other Poems (1929)

This Day in Film History (Von Stroheim’s Mutilated “Greed” Opens)

December 4, 1924—Running 2½ hours, the silent film Greed was nothing like the project originally conceived by director Erich von Stroheim. 

Less than a quarter remained of the footage after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production head Irving Thalberg ordered it drastically cut. Nobody ended up satisfied with the results. 

While MGM wept at the gross (only $277,000 domestically compared with a cost of $585,000, a fortune in those days), von Stroheim fumed over a project not only snatched from his hands but impossible to reconstruct, because all unused footage had been burned to extract just a few cents worth of silver in the nitrate.

The epic adaptation of Frank Norris’ naturalistic novel McTeague would be on most cineastes’ short lists for lost masterpieces. Not surprisingly, even the closest thing to it—a 239-minute version from Turner Classic Movies several years ago—added only another 99 minutes, with rephotographed stills, a “continuity screenplay,” and a new score. Jonathan Rosenbaum offers a fine assessment of this reclamation project.

I’ve always been amused by a story that Billy Wilder told about meeting Erich von Stroheim at wardrobe tests for the latter’s role as General Erwin Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo. “I clicked my heels,” Wilder recalled, “and said, ‘Isn’t it ridiculous, little me directing you? You were always ten years ahead of your time.’”

Von Stroheim’s reply: “Twenty, Mr. Wilder. Twenty.”

“Oh, that arrogant, crazy guy,” I used to think. More recently, though, I’ve reconsidered. What if von Stroheim was being, believe it or not, modest?

That’s not a characteristic you associate with the actor once billed in Hollywood as “The Man You Love To Hate,” someone whose very name was an artifice (the “von” was meant to suggest an aristocratic Austrian ancestry that did not exist) and whose top billing as military commanders in Five Graves to Cairo and Jean Renoir’s antiwar classic Grand Illusion was pretty ironic, considering that he had deserted from the Austrian army.

But let’s consider how Greed foreshadowed later developments in entertainment. It’s entirely conceivable, viewed in this prism, that von Stroheim was not merely twenty years ahead of his time, but forty, even fifty.

Which time frame you prefer tells much about whether you subscribe to the auteur theory—i.e., the notion that a film is preeminently the product of one person’s, the director’s, vision—or if you believe that film is more of a collaboration among director, producer, screenwriter, and other creative forces.

If you’re an auteur aficionado, then you see von Stroheim as a visionary bursting not just beyond his time but beyond even his medium. Many believe that von Stroheim was aiming at something close to a page-for-page transcription of McTeague. Rosenbaum, pointing out that nearly a fifth of the plot in the script occurs before the novel’s opening sentence, suggests an even more expansive view.

Seen in this light, the 42 reels and 47,000 feet of film that the director came up with surge way, way beyond the limits of film to that time. 

The mode of presentation that he suggested to the studio—playing it over two consecutive days—was tried out two decades ago in Little Dorrit, the adaptation of Charles Dickens’ behemoth Victorian novel directed by Christine Edzard and starring Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness.

Even Little Dorrit, though, clocked in at 360 minutes—six hours. The original Greed still surpassed that in length (though the version that von Stroheim was aiming for with his two-day plea to MGM, approximately four hours, wasn't quite as long).

It's like a scientist--say, a Leonardo--who comes up with a concept not just decades, but even centuries ahead of its time, but, because he doesn't have the equipment, doesn't know how to implement it.

No, I’m afraid that there was only one medium that could have encompassed von Stroheim’s vision, one not even invented at that point, one that, after it came to maturity, enjoyed a two-decade heyday before falling victim to Hollywood’s stern laws of economics (one that von Stroheim, of course, cheerfully flouted): the TV mini-series.

Forty years ago this fall, public television in the U.S. spun out over 26 weeks the British import The Forsyte Saga. The following that the adaptation of Nobel Prize laureate John Galsworthy's magnum opus generated helped to create an audience for the later arrival, Masterpiece Theatre.

When it was time to remake it 3 1/2 decades later, what viewers gained in technique—color instead of black-and-white, film instead of videotape—they lost in time—seven episodes instead of 26. That reflected the wall that TV producers had hit: too long a series meant too much of a gamble. The old-style epic miniseries had its real last hurrah when War and Remembrance premiered on ABC in 1990.

The miniseries that von Stroheim might have really appreciated was Berlin Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 ½-hour adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s novel of Germany in the dying years of the Weimar Republic. The two directors shared the same perspective on the ills of capitalism, lust, and the deterioration of individuals under the pressure of modern mores.

There is, as I’ve said, another school of thought that holds that film is nothing like the ego trip licensed by the auteur theorists, that it involves give and take among the studio, director, screenwriter, and star(s). In this view, megalomaniacal directors need to be reined in before they wreck studios, let alone single productions.

I’m not talking here about Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor star vehicle so preposterous, someone once said, that it was “the end of the era of two of everything, and twice as big.” That became a milestone in cost overruns because of Twentieth-Century Fox’s decision to shelve one set and director and go in a different direction—in effect, creating a second film with additional costs.

No, I’m talking about Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the 1980 film that became synonymous with what could happen when a director, with an ego recently swollen from an Oscar win (The Deer Hunter), believing all the stories that he's a genius, gets not only final cut but carte blanche to run amok. You might think of Cimino’s true cinematic forebear as von Stroheim.

Von Stroheim should have known better than to try Irving Thalberg's patience. The boy wonder of Hollywood had dismissed him from Universal Pictures after six weeks of shooting Merry Go Round because of bloated budgets. At MGM, Von Stroheim probably thought he had a clear field to make his dream project, the adaptation of McTeague.

The problem was that Thalberg had migrated from Universal to the newly formed MGM. He well knew what von Stroheim could do, and he had his eyes peeled out on him. Von Stroheim should have trod carefully. It just goes to show: don't burn your bridges.

In later years, Thalberg would be regarded as a genius of the studio system, a rare businessman whose instinct for translating a story into visual terms would be celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who transformed him into tragic hero Monroe Stahr in the unfinished The Last Tycoon. But Thalberg has come in for his share of abuse over his role in destroying Greed.

Destroying that footage is extreme. But in the early 1920s, film was not yet regarded as an art, the way it is today. It would be like tampering with a video game.

Funny—in literature, critics hail economy, especially the likes of its evangelists, Flaubert, James, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The word “saga” is enough to make critics break out into hives.

So why isn’t economy celebrated in the same way in film? Why do we clamor for every missing segment, no matter how misguided? 

You can argue persuasively that the 1954 version of A Star is Born was badly amputated after its premiere, but do we really need the “director’s cut” of an already overblown Oliver Stone film?

The miracle was that von Stroheim not only had been allowed to push the boundaries of cinema (and censor boards) before, but that he’d continue to do so even beyond Greed. His stock in trade, before and after Greed, was lust, decadence, and upper-class amorality. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would have been just the type of assignment he’d tackle if he were alive today.

Only von Stroheim’s rookie feature, Blind Husbands, survives in anywhere near the form he intended. Here’s the rundown on his other efforts, besides Greed, through the rest of the decade:

* The Devil’s Pass Key (1920)—utterly lost.

* Foolish Wives (1921)—no more than a third of its 6 1/2-hour rough cut survives.

* Merry Go Round (1923)—see above.

* The Merry Widow (1925)—Thalberg, working with von Stroheim again at MGM, attempting to mediate between the director and boss Louis B. Mayer, had a heart attack during production; maybe that had something to do with the fact that, though the studio reportedly cut scenes relating to a bordello, wedding night exotica, and a baron’s foot fetish, the main structure of the film remained largely intact.

* Wedding March (1928)—the second half was lost in a fire.

* Queen Kelly (1929)—Joe Kennedy agreed to finance a film for mistress Gloria Swanson, despite the fact that von Stroheim was between jobs after a record of cost overruns and countless clashes with studios and actors. Against all reason, Kennedy hired the monocle-wearing, riding-crop-brandishing martinet. One scene after another was filmed—in a brothel, and a seduction in a convent—until, supposedly, von Stroheim’s instructions to an actor playing a seducer to dribble tobacco juice while kissing Swanson’s hand persuaded her that he’d taken leave of his senses. Kennedy sent von Stroheim packing pronto.

Von Stroheim loved to spend studio dollars while keeping executives at a distance. Being true to the setting of McTeague—in San Francisco and Death Valley—would also allow him to shoot away from interference. Or so he thought. Of course, he guessed wrong.

(By the way, New Jersey film buffs might be interested to know that the Garden State had played a role in an earlier version of Greed—a 1915 silent known as Life’s a Whirlpool. World Film Productions, based out of Fort Lee, N.J., decided, like von Stroheim, to shoot in Death Valley for its climactic scenes. The crew reached their destination only after a horrific sandstorm, according to a Moving Picture World account reprinted in Richard Koszarski’s Fort Lee: The Film Town.)

After the 1920s, Stroheim was through as a director. He's best known to fans of classic films as Max, the butler to Swanson's mad Norma Desmond in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Just as Stroheim had directed Swanson, Max, before his fall from grace, had directed Desmond.

I would have loved to have seen what passed between the two of them, two decades after their initial debacle...