Gibson Gowland as MacTeague after his cousin bites his ear, one of the many fun-filled moments in, "Greed"

Wow, where do I even begin. If you remember yesterday, I was silently hoping I didn’t get stuck watching the four hour restored version of Greed. Well, low and behold, here I am about six hours after I started watching this (I took a bunch of breaks) and I really don’t know where to start. This is one ofthose never-ending movies that just goes on and on and on and on… In fact, it’s like The Song That Never Ends, only the movie-version.

There three stories going on at the same time, the main one follows a dentist MacTeague who falls in love with his cousin’s girl, Trina. When Trina has to go in to have a tooth replaced (cuz she fell off a swing and broke her tooth), she buys a lottery ticket from a shady Mexican (of course) named Maria. While under the gas and getting her new gold tooth put in, MacTeague decides this is the perfect time to plant a kiss on her. (Weirdo) Then later, when he tells his cousin Marcus about it, naturally Marcus throws a fit but before you can say, “What the f–,” he says it’s a-OK by him.

Gibson Gowland as MacTeague demonstrating an alternative use for a pistol in, "Greed"

Trina goes on to win the $5,000 lottery (which ain’t that big a deal. I won that much on a Scratcher once) and marries MacTeague, but becomes increasingly stingy (which is why I put my five grand in the stock market and watched it disappear. Kidding. Kinda) and Marcus feels screwed cuz he gave up the girl and the money. And that’s just in the first hour.

I’ll spar you the rest of the story, but I will say that I really liked the soundtrack on this movie and the story itself has a nice flow to it. Using a combination of live-action and still photographed spliced with frequent title cards, I liked the actual movie itself. It’s just that where a normal two hour movie (or for that matter a James Cameron or Peter Jackson movie) would end, this movie just kept going. Granted, the “wide released” version is only about two and half hours long, which seems like a short film compared to this marathon.

This movie also uses a nice mix of COLOR!! Yup, gold and blues mostly throughout. Whenever there’s a piece of gold (gold coins, gold teeth, etc.) or during nighttime sequences (the blue kicks in) the film changes colors. It kind of reminded me of that little girl in Schindler’s List with the red rose. And the blue hues reminded me of the orange hues of the opening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Considering I hit the wall yesterday, I was impressed that I was able to make it through such a long movie. Tomorrow will be tricky though. The closing of Nisei Week will eat up my afternoon and evening, so look for Day 16’s post of Seven Chances sometime in the morning. Nothing like some Buster Keaton first thing in the morning.