Greed (1924 film)

Greed
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Erich von Stroheim
Screenplay by	Erich von Stroheim Contractually credited: June Mathis
Based on	McTeague 1899 novel by Frank Norris
Produced by	Erich von Stroheim Abe Lehr Irving Thalberg
Starring	Gibson Gowland ZaSu Pitts Jean Hersholt
Cinematography	Ben F. Reynolds William H. Daniels
Edited by	Erich von Stroheim Frank Hull (42-reel and 24-reel versions) Rex Ingram Grant Whytock (18-reel version) June Mathis Joseph W. Farnham (10-reel version)
Music by	William Axt
Production company	The Goldwyn Company–Metro-Goldwyn
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date	December 4, 1924 (1924-12-04)
Running time	Over 9 hours (first cut)[1][2] 140 minutes (original release)[2] 239 minutes (reconstruction)
Country	United States
Languages	Silent film English intertitles
Budget	$665,603
Box office	$274,827

Greed is a 1924 American silent psychological drama 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 Trina Sieppe, his wife; 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.

Greed was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location, with von Stroheim shooting approximately 85 hours of footage before editing. Two months alone were spent shooting in Death Valley for the film's final sequence, and many of the cast and crew became ill. Von 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 bêtes humaines (human beasts), a naturalistic concept in the vein of Zola.

During editing, the production company merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), putting Irving Thalberg in charge of post-production. Thalberg had fired von Stroheim a few years earlier at Universal Pictures. Originally almost eight hours long, Greed was edited against von 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. Von Stroheim later called Greed his most fully realized work and was hurt both professionally and personally by the studio's re-editing of it.^[3]

The uncut version has been called the "holy grail" for film archivists, amid repeated false claims of the discovery of the missing footage. In 1999, Turner Entertainment created a four-hour version that used existing stills of cut scenes to reconstruct the film. Greed was a critical and financial failure upon its initial release, but, by the 1950s, it began to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made; filmmakers and scholars have noted its influence on subsequent films. In 1958, the film was voted number 6 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo.^[4][5]