Greed (film)

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Greed

Directed by	Erich von Stroheim
Produced by	Irving Thalberg Louis B. Mayer
Written by	June Mathis Erich von Stroheim Frank Norris (novel)
Starring	ZaSu Pitts Gibson Gowland Jean Hersholt Dale Fuller Tempe Pigott Chester Conklin
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	December 4, 1924
Running time	140 min 239 min (restored)
Country	United States
Language	Silent film English intertitles
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Greed is a 1924 dramatic silent movie starring Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt and Chester Conklin.

The plot follows an honest dentist whose wife wins a lottery ticket, only to become obsessed with money. When her former lover betrays the dentist as a fraud, all of their lives are destroyed.

The movie was adapted by Erich von Stroheim (shooting screenplay) and Joseph Farnham (titles) from the novel McTeague by Frank Norris. (The onscreen credit for June Mathis was strictly a contractual obligation to her on the part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, as she was not actually involved in the production). It was directed by von Stroheim.

1 Production
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Production

The story of the making of the movie has become a Hollywood legend. Under the aegis of the Goldwyn studio, von Stroheim attempted to film a version of the book complete in every detail. To capture the authentic spirit of the story, he insisted on the filming on location in San Francisco, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and Death Valley, despite harsh conditions.

The result was a final print of the film that was an astonishing ten hours in length, produced at a cost of over $500,000 — an unheard of sum at that time. After screening the full-length film once to meet contractual obligations ^[1], Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that acquired Goldwyn during production, forced von Stroheim to edit the film to a more manageable length, and, with the assistance of fellow director Rex Ingram and editor Grant Whytock, he reluctantly trimmed the film to about four hours. The film was then removed from von Stroheim's control and cut further, despite his protests. Even key characters were removed from the final version so that it could be screened in a reasonable timeframe. Existing prints of Greed run at about two hours and twenty minutes. The hours of cut film were destroyed (although it appears that much of it survived until at least the late 1950s), and this film is known as one of the most famous "Lost films" in cinema history. The released version of the film was a box-office failure, and was fiercely panned by critics. In later years, even in its shortened form, it was recognized as one of the great realistic films of its time. Rare behind-the-scenes footage of Greed can be seen in the Goldwyn Pictures film Souls for Sale.

In 1999, Turner Entertainment (the film's current rights holder) decided to "recreate," as closely as possible, the original version by combining the existing footage with still photographs of the lost scenes, in accordance with an original continuity outline written by director Erich von Stroheim. This restoration runs almost four hours. The re-edit was produced by Rick Schmidlin. (Other classic films with missing footage include Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, George Cukor's A Star Is Born and von Stroheim's Queen Kelly).

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

A representative for Warner Home Video has said that a DVD release of the film is planned either in late 2006 or in 2007. [1]