Free Frames by Loren D. Estleman

came “Louis B. Mayer presents an Erich von Stroheim Production”; then, in great black capitals outlined in yellow upon a field of gold nuggets sinisterly sparkling:
     
    GREED
     
    He applauded explosively. He couldn’t help himself. A glance back over his shoulder revealed Broadhead’s round rumpled face set in a mask of supreme self-satisfaction, a clump of hair fallen over one eye, his unlit pipe in his mouth in the light escaping through the louvers in the projector. The professor never sat down while showing a film, but stood in a wrestler’s crouch for hours at a time, muscles tensed, ready to shut down the power the instant the machinery faltered; one jammed frame was all it took to start a fire.
     
    Valentino had seen the picture before, in both the 133-minute truncated version released in 1925 and the four-hour restoration produced by Rick Schmidlin in 2000, using hundreds of stills and dialogue cards to provide some semblance of the original narrative; Valentino and Broadhead had contributed many of the photographs, acquired from estate auctions, overlooked library files, and junk shops whose owners had no idea of their significance. Von Stroheim’s own continuity script, found among his effects after his death in 1957, had been used to interpret their meaning and establish their order. But the result, for Valentino at least, had been a disappointment.
     
    It was neither von Stroheim’s fault nor Schmidlin’s, nor that of anyone else involved at either end. The photographic team of Ben F. Reynolds and William H. Daniels was superb, the San Francisco and Death Valley locations were vivid, and the performances of leading players Zasu Pitts and Gibson Gowland reached beyond the screen and across eight decades to wrench the most jaded modern heart. It was a meticulous and sensitive reconstruction. But movies were meant to move. Nearly two hours of period snapshots inserted in long sections among the surviving action footage, with title cards to explain and connect, did less to reveal genius than it did to reduce the director’s version to a stultifying evening spent in front of an undiverting historical documentary on PBS.
     
    But this movie deleted every pixel of that unsatisfactory experience from his memory.
     
    Based on Frank Norris’ turn-of-the-century novel McTeague, the film lingered over every line and nuance of the book to trace the descent of a dim-witted but good-natured brute into resentment, obsession, and double murder. Fallen upon hard times after marrying the woman of his dreams, the loutish dentist is at first elated by his bride’s lottery windfall, then puzzled by her miserly refusal to spend a penny of it to improve their lot. As bafflement deteriorates into rage, the sin of avarice turns deadly on several levels, dooming husband, wife, and best friend and ending in an irony as bleak as the desert where it takes place.
     
    The first reel, of course, didn’t go that far, or even very far past the first plot point: the hulking dentist yielding to temptation and stealing a kiss from his pretty patient as she lies sedated in his chair—definitely an ick moment for moviegoers of the 1920s as well as today’s, but presented with a subtle compassion that encouraged pity rather than revulsion. Von Stroheim’s glacial pace, with slow camera pans and long close-ups of twitching faces, promised to take as much of his viewers’ time as if they had sat down and read the book from beginning to end. Everything about the approach was alien, yet hypnotic, like watching a rather shabby flower opening its petals in stop-motion. It gave the subject beauty.
     
    The tailpiece flapped through the gate, the screen went blank. Valentino was still staring at it, transfixed by the ghosts that still inhabited it, when he realized Broadhead was talking. For a man who shared his protégé’s love for moving pictures, the older man seemed physically incapable of allowing the fantasy to fade before he