Greed (1924 film)

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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1991.

Greed is a 1924 American silent drama film written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina.

Why It Rocks

1. This film is notable for being one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location (with Stroheim shooting approximately 85 hours of footage before editing) which was a rarity at the time.
2. Even with various scenes being drastically altered and cut from the film (see Bad Qualities for more information), there was still enough remaining material left to create a strong, powerful timeless cautionary story.
3. Gibson Gowl and ZaSu Pitts both have incredibly strong performances that continue to haunt viewers to this day.
4. Mac McTeague and Trina are both very complex and well-written characters. What little sympathy we feel for them (mainly Mac) is largely grounded and overwritten by a combination of pity and revulsion. The audience is also brought to their level, and offered entry into their lives and the horrors that come with their actions. Marcus may not be as complex has the former two, but he definitely has his moments.
   • On top of that, the greed target is never completely stable, nobody in the film's devoid of flaws. Even though Trina won the lottery and is painted as the victim, she's not so innocent as she chose to hoard all of her winnings to herself away from her husband. Marcus was perfectly willing to sell his own friend out over money. But the most notable is definitely Mac who, among other things, nearly forced himself on an unconscious Trina in his dentist’s chair, then he spends much of their marriage abusing her – and in one particularly disturbing scene, bites her fingers as punishment for keeping her winnings from him. And that's not even getting into Maria & Zerkow's terrible relationship and Old Grannis and Miss Baker's love
5. The film has a lot of subtle easy-to-miss metaphors.
   • Throughout, a pair of canaries stands in rather bluntly for Mac and Trina, and later Mac releases one as he resigns himself to death in the desert, the other having already died along with Trina. The bird now serves to demonstrate that in death our antihero will be free of his own cruelty and selfishness. This also serves to bookend the film by mirroring the opening scene in which Mac gently rescued the injured bird, reminding us of his ever-present humanity.
6. Both the full version and the abridged version which was released are incredibly faithful to capture the nature and spirit of the original novel the film's based on.

Bad Qualities

1. The film has a notorious history related to its post-production in which MGM edited the film down against Von Stroheim's wishes from his initial 42-reel cut (over 9 hours) to about 13 reels (that's 2 hours and 13 minutes) and the cut sequences were destroyed. As a result, there are a lot of plot points and side stories that are left unexplained and unfinished, and most film viewers will never be able to see the finished version of the film.
   • A 239-minute version was created in 1999, but even there, still photos were used for missing sequences to create their version.