The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from the perspective of the Watergate burglars and write about themselves from the third person perspective as if they were characters like everyone else. The story may be apocryphal—Redford would also much later attempt to take credit for writing the screenplay which earned William Goldman an Oscar—but the historical fact is undeniable: the man who made the movie was an influential voice in the room of the men who wrote the book.
Too bad that same deal did not apply to Erich Von Stroheim and Frank Norris, otherwise, perhaps the novel would bear the far more appropriate title which Von Stroheim chose for his film adaptation of the book. Greed would become one of the most ambitious films ever as the legendary director attempted to do the impossible: literally recreate every single page of the novel on the screen. The amazing part is that he actually delivered on his ambition only to watch as the studio tried desperately to cut the unmarketable eight hour long final cut into something more manageable. That eight hour version remains perhaps the Holy Grail of all of Hollywood’s so-called “lost films.”
The story of a Von Stroheim’s almost Ahab-like monomania to pursue the impossible dream of making a literal film version of a novel should be all one needs to ever know about just how highly praised and admired the text was in its day. While the passage of time has created some revisionist apologies for earlier critics who were too keen to overlook some of the more obvious plot machinations and thin character development, it is almost irrefutable that Von Stroheim for one overlooked these arguable failings of the novel for one very good reason. Upon publication, the official title was McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, but that isn’t even close to accurate. Von Stroheim changed the title to Greed for his film version because that is not just one of the seven deadly sins, but the sin that was infecting America.
McTeague is not just cautionary tale about the potential danger lurking in America’s growing obsession with acquisition and wealth for wealth’s sake, it contains scene after scene that brilliantly illuminate Karl Marx’s conception of the “fetishism of commodities” outlined in Capital: Critique of Political Economy three decades earlier. The imagery of a naked Trina seductively rolling around on bed filled with coins in 1899 would create a direct link to the scene in the most notorious and defamed novel to be released in 1900. Theodore Dreiser’s titular heroine in Sister Carrie her lace collar and leather shoes actually speaking to her with almost lurid temptations to buy, buy, buy! Between the distinctly sexual scene of the naked wife of McTeague and consumer goods taking on a sentient life of their own as their own advertisement, 20th century book lovers would soon start reading something they had never seen before: a critique of capitalism as an obstruction to realizing the promised “good life” that came with achieving the American Dream rather than mechanism of actually achieving it.
For Frank Norris—in complete agreement with Erich Von Stroheim—greed is most definitely not, for lack of a better word, good.
