In the era of sound, many of the finest silent directors would follow up with equal or greater successes. The most exemplary being Erich Von Stroheim (1885-1957), an Austrian emigre whose self-appointed 'Von' covered modest middle-class Jewish origins and Irishman Rex Ingram, who ironically possessed the surname Hitchcock. Both men were absolutely hampered by European ideals of artistry that put them increasingly at odds with the Hollywood establishment, chiefly as represented by Irving Thalberg over at MGM.
In 1924, the year that Louis B. Mayer was brought in to run the amalgamated Metro and Goldwyn companies, Ingram, one of Metro's most successful directors since The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). had catapulted the career of Rudolph Valentino and retreated to Victorine Studios in Nice on the French Riviera. which would be his base for the following eight years of his active career. Ingram would remain in Hollywood long enough to re-edit his friend Stroheim's Greed and whittled it down from its original whopping 42 reels to a mere 18. The 18 reels were still too much content for MGM who hacked out a further eight for the film's premiere in December of 1924. Thus was Stroheim's lavish adaptation of Frank Norris's naturalistic novel McTeague about a San Francisco dentist played with aplomb by Gibson Gowland for whom playing villains was a specialty -. and his status obsessed spouse (ZaSu Pitts) reduced to a bare outline. Ingram's own favorite film, Mare Nostrum (Our Seal,1926) an intricate tale of love and espionage starring his wife Alice Terry, was likewise on the editor's chopping block at MGM. but at least it was a fair commercial success which Greed probably was not.
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| Things went accordion to plan with 1924's Greed, pictured above ZaSu Pitts and Gilbert Gowland |
Stroheim had already had trouble with his previous studio Universal, despite the roaring success of his first feature Blind Husbands in 1919. All of his silent features spare Greed were fantasies of European high and low life that sardonically passed judgment on each of the social classes. The third - 1922's Foolish Wives was set in an elaborate studio-constructed Monte Carlo with Stroheim himself again as the European villain Carl Laemmile, head of Universal effectively advertised it as the first million dollar movie but he and Thalberg, his head of production at MGM for the Greed fiasco - though even in a truncated form Greed remains a masterpiece. Stroheim's final feature - The Merry Widow (1925) which starred Mae Murray and John Gilbert, proved quite popular. One of its standout characters an aristocratic foot-fetishist would invoke Stroheim's famous zinger : ' And you are a footage fetishist!'