Greed (film)
| Greed | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Erich von Stroheim |
| Produced by | Erich von Stroheim Irving Thalberg |
| Written by | Erich von Stroheim June Mathis (credited contractually) |
| Based on |
McTeague by Frank Norris |
| Starring |
Gibson Gowland ZaSu Pitts Jean Hersholt |
| Music by | William Axt |
| Cinematography | Ben F. Reynold and William H. Daniels |
| Edited by | Erich von Stroheim and Frank Hull (42-reel and 24-reel versions) Rex Ingram and Grant Whytock (18-reel version) June Mathis and Joseph W. Farnham (10-reel version) |
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Production
company |
The Goldwyn Company–Metro-Goldwyn
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| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
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Release date
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Running time
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462 minutes (original cut) 140 minutes (original release) 239 minutes (restored) |
| Country | United States |
| Language |
Silent film English intertitles |
| Budget | $665,603 |
| Box office | $274,827 |
Greed is a 1924 American silent film, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague. It stars Gibson Gowland as Dr. John McTeague, ZaSu Pitts as his wife Trina Sieppe and Jean Hersholt as McTeague's friend and eventual enemy Marcus Schouler. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina. Shortly after their engagement, Trina wins a lottery prize of $5,000, at that time a substantial sum. Schouler jealously informs the authorities that McTeague had been practicing dentistry without a license, and McTeague and Trina become impoverished. While living in squalor, McTeague becomes a violent alcoholic and Trina becomes greedily obsessed with her winnings, refusing to spend any of them, despite how poor she and her husband have become. Eventually McTeague murders Trina for the money and flees to Death Valley. Schouler catches up with him there for a final confrontation.
Stroheim shot more than 85 hours of footage and obsessed over accuracy during the filming. Two months were spent shooting in Death Valley for the film's final sequence and many of the cast and crew became ill. Greed was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location. Stroheim used sophisticated filming techniques such as deep-focus cinematography and montage editing. He considered Greed to be a Greek tragedy, in which environment and heredity controlled the characters' fates and reduced them to primitive bête humaines (human beasts).
During the making of Greed, the production company merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, putting Irving Thalberg in charge of the production. Thalberg had fired Stroheim a few years earlier at Universal Pictures. Originally almost eight hours long, Greed was edited against Stroheim's wishes to about two-and-a-half hours. Only twelve people saw the full-length 42-reel version, now lost; some of them called it the greatest film ever made. Stroheim later called Greed his most fully realized work and was hurt both professionally and personally by the studio's re-editing of it.
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