Erich von Stroheim
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We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
Based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! the movie opens with an excellent 12-minute sequence with no dialogue -- perhaps a nod to Erich von Stroheim's silent milestone, Greed, also about the destructive power of accumulated wealth?
His films aren’t really like anyone else’s, though in the case of his latest, There Will Be Blood, there are certainly strong intimations of at least three other movies—Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1923), Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).
By depositing such a complex emotional drywell of a man in the absurd luxury of a manor house with its own bowling alley and then leaving him there to molder and unlatch, Anderson creates an indictment of the American success ethic so detailed and yet so centered on the personal and psychological that the nearest point of comparison is probably Citizen Kane or even Greed .
Mr. Anderson's epic fable about the American Dream begs comparison with other great American classics "Greed," "Chinatown," and even "Citizen Kane," though perhaps it's not of the same overall merit in spitting out its allegoryâ??as it gets bogged down too much in covering its misogynist main characters, who are used to serve a schematic political purpose.
So when the showdown comes, as the movie promises, the sequence feels unsatisfying, not like that in, say, Ethan and Joel Coen’s “True Grit,” where a young girl gets justice for a murdered father, but rather where two men you barely know, seeing them only in dire circumstances, are locked in a death struggle not unlike McTeague and Marcus in Death Valley at the climax of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed.”
I told him it reminded me of Erich Von Stroheim's exhilarating silent classic Greed , a movie that even in abridged form (Von Stroheim's original cut, long lost, was nearly nine hours) is an uncompromising, visceral experiment in naturalism.
So far, so good, but Greed borrows all the bad ideas from McKay’s sadly influential The Big Short .
Although Erich von Stroheim’s mauled 1924 masterpiece “Greed” is nearly 100 years old, it is sufficiently monumental that adopting its title can still seem like an attempted flex.
It was the character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in Oliver Stone's Wall Street who argued: "Greed is good."
In Greed, Winterbottom goes after the rich and the decadent with satire, employing his usual muse Steve Coogan — once again at his obnoxious finest.
There are deliberate echoes to Sunset Boulevard, too, and through Gloria Swanson to 1929's Queen Kelly.
Roger Ebert, who considers this film one of the best ever made, calls it "foolhardy", and compares it to other mad masterworks like Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
What further distends the movie are the compulsiveness of its allusions (everything from Stroheims Greed to Coppolas Godfather gets referenced), the virtuosic abandon of its set-pieces (the opening clash, a disrupted assassination, a few indulgent monologues), the visual thrall to those cavernous Fellini sets, and the carnivalesque devotion to filling those environments with the people, costumes, and grotesqueries Fellini might have put there.
As such, there are no big themes here beyond the "greed is bad" credo we've seen in everything from Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film Greed to recent Wall Street swipes such as Boiler Room (also based on Belfort's life) to Margin Call.
He accidentally stumbles upon a decaying mansion inhabited by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a movie star during the silent film era, and her butler/chauffeur (Erich von Stroheim, director of the legendarily lengthy "Greed").
When Desmond shows Gillis her old film it's Queen Kelly (1929), a real, although incomplete, film directed by Stroheim and starring Swanson.
In another case of art imitating life, Norma's former director-turned-butler is played by Erich von Stroheim, who directed Swanson in Queen Kelly, the film that ruined his career behind the camera.
The excerpt of a silent movie starring Norma Desmond that appears within the film was actually an excerpt from "Queen Kelly," a controversial silent picture starring Gloria Swanson and directed by none other than her co-star here, Erich von Stroheim.
There are unmistakable parallels with von Stroheim, who directed Swanson in "Queen Kelly” (1928), whose credits included " Greed " and "The Merry Widow,” but who directed only two sound films and was reduced to playing Nazi martinets and parodies of himself in other people's films.
In fact, the silent movie screened in the old mansion is Queen Kelly, directed by von Stroheim in 1929 and starring Gloria Swanson.
Apart from the sociological and history lesson within the film, upon exiting the theater I was probably most struck by its modern update on the more general parable of how greed corrupts the human soul, particularly for people who come from a lower economic background; much in the way that Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film masterpiece Greed did in 1924.
La posibilidad de un triángulo amoroso en las montañas evoca Blind Husbands (1919), de Erich von Stroheim.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
Directed by Peter Jackson
influenced by Greed (1924)
Plot
For 90 years critics have lamented the loss of Erich Von Stroheim’s eight-hour cut of Greed , his adaptation of Frank Norris’ 375-page novel McTeague.
(Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “Cleopatra” being two of the most famous examples.)
Jackson is filming J.R.R. Tolkien's book at a rate of two to three minutes per page (on pace with Erich von Stroheim's long-lost eight-hour cut of Greed), and here he pads the running time by tying this prequel's storyline into his own Lord of the Rings films.
There is a legendary story that in adapting the novel "McTeague" to the screen in a little film called "Greed," director Erich von Stroheim was supposedly obsessed with the idea of literally filming every single page of the book.
Scorsese’s and Zaillian’s work must be measured by the storytelling form and length of The Leopard (1963), and of the ’60s roadshow epics like Spartacus (1960) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), but with the intimacy and political acumen of Stroheim, especially what we know of Greed (1924), and most profoundly of all, the overwhelming sadness of the movie’s greatest influence, Barry Lyndon (1975).