Of Greedy and McTeague

I remember how back in March 1994 the film Greedy came out with what seemed somewhat more than the usual fanfare for a late winter/early spring release in those days.

As it happened the critics received the film as less than a complete success, while the box office was not boffo. (According to Box Office Mojo it was not even among the top hundred earners at the U.S. box office in 1994.) Unsurprisingly the movie seems to have been quickly forgotten afterward--and since then, never being rediscovered and acquiring a cult following the way some films do, remained in the obscurity into which it had passed. Still, I enjoyed it at the time and think it had its good points, not least a twist-filled plot more than usually ambitious for comedies of the day, and some memorable performances--not least, those of screen legend Kirk Douglas as the scheming family patriarch, Olivia d'Abo as his "nurse," and Phil Hartman as the nastiest of his would-be heirs.

The film's cinematic and literary allusions, which went over my head at the time, seem at least to be a point of interest. The title Greedy was a play on Eric von Stroheim's classic silent film Greed (1924)--which was an adaptation of Frank Norris' novel McTeague (1899), with all this, of course, reflected in "McTeague" being the name of the family in question.

Of course, that--and the fact that greed is indeed a theme of the film--is as far as it goes. Norris' novel, to the extent that it is remembered today, is recalled as a classic of Zolaesque naturalism in all its social insight, and the forcefulness, even brutality, with which it conveyed that insight. (McTeague centers on a love triangle involving two friends and the woman they both want, the three members of which may be fairly described as ruining and killing each other--with their deaths prefigured by the destruction of another couple before them.)

By all accounts Von Stroheim's Greed was faithful to that. By contrast Greedy was a high concept comedy, and not an especially dark one, which delivers the expected happy ending--with the result that in the end the title of the film and the choice of McTeague as the family name are just allusions, nothing more, with even a relatively favorably disposed viewer of the film like myself not ready to claim any clear evidence that the makers of the film had anything much deeper on their minds.