One Paragraph Movie Review: Greed

Two hundred and fourth film: Greed, a silent film from 1924 about a big simple unlicensed dentist with a stingy wife and a smarmy nemesis. I watched a version without musical accompaniment, and two and a bit hours sitting in complete silence watching a movie is a pretty weird time. Good thing I — and nobody else since the only copy was apparently destroyed — wasn’t watching the original nine-hour version. And even though you don’t expect a story about a dentist to finish with a handcuffed fist fight in Death Valley, and even though you don’t expect a handful of artsy dream sequences in an extremely old film about marriage problems, and even though the caged birds are quite clearly a frequently bashed-out metaphor for those marriage problems, and even though they shoot a goddamn donkey at the end, any way you silently flip it, nine hours is too bloody long for a movie. Two and a bit hours is pushing it. Still, it’s pretty good, pretty melodramatic, pretty surprising, and pretty likely to make me exaggerate my facial expressions for the next week. Two and a bit wedding feast sheep skulls out of five.