Movies: From Utah comes news of another recovery from the buried Homeric Age of the Movies. Erich von Stroheim’s original Greed (made in 1924) has turned up, all nine hours of it. The celebrated two-hour version made by June Mathis, “unequal, opulent, florid, and instinct with a searing realism which owes as much to the artist’s knowledge of human passions as to his profound understanding of the pitiless power of the camera’s eye,” as Richard Griffith has said of it, “remains one of the greatest examples of cinematography extant.” Greed is a film version of Frank Norris’ Mc-Teague, the most strenuously naturalistic of American novels. Zasu Pitts, Gibson Gowland, and Jean Hersholt play the leads. Henri Langlois, curator of the Ciné-matèque Française, hopes to show the newly found version to Paris audiences soon. No plans have been announced for an American showing.
Not all the curriculum of high schools and colleges is presentable to the public at large. Plato’s Symposium is up before the Irish Dail for possible banning and Jules Dassin’s film Phaedra has been condemned by the Legion of Decency…. Variety reports with steady tongue that Ingrid Bergman will play in Ingmar Bergman’s filming of Hjalmar Bergman’s “Ingeborg.”
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