So in a bunch of ways, this is actually a lot like The Magnificent Ambersons: It was also based on a turn-of-the-century book (in this case, Frank Norris’ McTeague); it also follows a sprawling cast across events of years; and it was also butchered by the studio with footage that has been lost to history.

So the original cut of this movie was apparently eight hours(!), which is obviously untenable. The director (Erich von Stroheim, who btw played a faded once-great silent movie director in Sunset Boulevard) worked with an editor to cut it down to something closer to six hours, but the studio was like “fuck this” and just unilaterally cut it down to two hours against von Stroheim’s wishes.

But so even though the cut footage was lost, this version is a kind of partial restoration. It mixes the original footage with publicity stills to try to reconstruct the original movie. The effect is a little weird, as you’ll move from straight-up movie to a photograph that the camera focuses on different parts of for “dialogue” and reaction shots and the like. (It’s pretty heavy with the intertitles on those photograph parts, for obvious reasons. Oh yeah, this is a silent movie, probably should have mentioned that.)

Despite the weirdness of that effect, I think it’s probably still better in this reconstructed version than in the original, because honestly, the director was right about the studio butchering it. Based on what’s on film vs. what’s on photo, they apparently took this movie about a whole bunch of people, with different stories that play off against each other and illuminate the theme from different directions, and turned it into a story of a single couple. Which… I guess I can see how that would sort of work, but man, it’s a whole different movie if you do that.

So the theme of the movie is pretty much given away in the title, right. Most of the characters in the movie are relatively poor people — an unlicensed dentist, a rag girl, a junk man — and so money is a big deal in their lives. The rag girl tells (imagined?) stories about having been rich as a girl and eating off of gold plates, stories that so fascinate the junk dealer that he marries her to try to find those gold plates, and then eventually kills her when she can’t tell him where they are.

The main couple, though, is the dentist and the woman he “woos” — he originally met her as a patient (and steals a kiss while she’s under ether, which thank god the movie realizes is awful), at which point she’s dating a friend of his. The friend steps aside so the dentist can have her (because obvs women don’t get to choose who they want to date, come on), BUT right before they get married, she wins a lottery for $5,000 (which is something like $150K in today’s money), which gets that friend super-angry at having missed out on that.

(Also, speaking of them getting married: The wedding scene is all happy, but then at the end of it when everyone’s leaving, the bride is in tears and runs to her mom, and her mom’s not even surprised and is just all like “calm down, it won’t be that bad” and leaves, but then the bride remains in tears and tries to flee from her husband, and for the life of me I can’t tell if this is just how wedding nights were commonly represented back then, or if this is meant to be particularly horrible. The movie shows them as a happy couple both right before and right after this, but it’s weird.)

So over the course of this couple’s marriage, we see the friend getting more and more upset about the money he “lost”, and he gets in fights with the dentist and ultimately ends up reporting him to the authorities for being unlicensed, which loses him his livelihood. MEANWHILE, the wife becomes unhinged by the money and turns into this extreme miser, forcing the couple to live in poverty while she hides money away, and then stares lovingly at it while she’s alone. At one point, she literally takes all the coins out of a chest, puts them on the bed, and rolls around on them like the poor man’s Scrooge McDuck.

Obvs this all ends up leading to nowhere good, and when the unemployed, destitute dentist finds out that his wife has been hiding all this money, there’s a fight, he kills her, and then he leaves town to become a miner. The last half hour of the movie is the police — and his old frenemy (the one who had gotten mad about losing out on that money) — chasing him across the desert; ultimately they track him to Death Valley, and the police won’t go on, but the friend is obsessed and continues, finally finding him in the middle of a desolate waste. They fight over water, it spills, so they’re both fucked, but then they continue to fight over the money that the dentist took from his wife when he killed her. The dentist kills the friend, who in his last action handcuffs them together, and the film ends with the protagonist stuck in the middle of an arid wasteland, handcuffed to the corpse of his enemy with no water, haha whoo.

So yeah, it’s a dark movie, and not just in its overall story. Throughout the whole thing, there are all these kind of sad moments (including the rag girl having a baby die shortly after birth — there’s a whole funeral procession with a tiny coffin and everything).

What’s surprising, really, is how well this holds up. Yeah, it’s a little over the top, but no more so than like most Coen Brothers movies (which is really the genre that this is working in). It’s got a complex story that doesn’t feel primitive even though it’s from the early days of film, and being filmed entirely on location (even in Death Valley!) gives it a certain realism. It’s hard to recommend — it’s long, the reconstruction effects are a bit distancing, and it’s so so grim — but it’s easy to see why this gets onto the list.