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Greed Overview:

Greed (1924) was a Silent Films - Film Adaptation Film directed by Erich von Stroheim and produced by Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer.

SYNOPSIS

A silent-era monument, and intended by its director to achieve monumental length: eight hours. Even with studio-enforced cuts, von Stroheim's story (from the Frank Norris novel McTeague) remains powerful. A dentist loses everything because of his wife's (Pitts) fixation on money. He becomes a fugitive maddened by lust for money, and kills his captor, only to find himself handcuffed to a corpse and the gold he desires out of his reach. The video release includes a prologue hosted by film historian Kevin Brownlow explaining the controversy around cuts made to the film and the music score.

(Source: available at Amazon AMC Classic Movie Companion).

Greed was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1991.

Greed BlogHub Articles:

Screen Capture Theatre: "Scandal Sheet," or Greed All About It

By David on Mar 25, 2022 From The Man on the Flying Trapeze

From out of the blue of the western sky comes ... Screen Capture Theatre! Today's entry: the 1952 film ... "Scandal Sheet" takes place in a mythical world where people read newspapers. Rush Limbaugh -- I mean Broderick Crawford -- plays Mark Chapman, hard-driving newspaper editor. Chapman... Read full article

Silents are Golden: A Closer Look at – Greed (1924)

By Lea Stans on Nov 18, 2021 From Classic Movie Hub Blog

Silents are Golden: A Closer Look at – Greed (1924) With its deeply, grittily realistic story and grand, almost operatic themes, Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague is one of the great American books of the late 19th century. While many critics disliked it at the time for being overly “vulga... Read full article

Greed (1924)

By 4 Star Film Fan on Jun 12, 2016 From 4 Star Films

With some cinematic endeavors, there is simply an aura that surrounds them which informs how we look at them. Erich von Stroheim’s ambitious silent film Greed is such a picture. To this day, a full cut of the film has never been found and perhaps never will be, but it has survived in two versi... Read full article

Greed (1924)

By 4 Star Film Fan on Jun 12, 2016 From 4 Star Films

With some cinematic endeavors there is simply an aura that surrounds them which informs how we look at them. Erich von Stroheim’s ambitious silent film Greed is such a picture. To this day, a full cut of the film has never been found and perhaps never will be, but it has survived in two versio... Read full article

Greed (1924)

By 4 Star Film Fan on Jun 3, 2016 From 4 Star Films

With some cinematic endeavors there is simply an aura that surrounds them which informs how we look at them. Erich von Stroheim’s ambitious silent film Greed is such a picture. To this day, a full cut of the film has never been found and perhaps never will be, but it has survived in two versio... Read full article

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Greed Quotes:

Marcus: There's no water... within a hundred miles o' here!
[the two men hopelessly stand by the dead mule in the middle of the desert]
Marcus: We... are... dead... men!
Trina: Let's go sit on the sewer.
See More Quotes from Greed
Greed Facts
While filming the final confrontation in the desert, Erich von Stroheim allegedly shouted several times at actors Gibson Gowland and Jean Hersholt "Hate each other! Hate each other as much as you hate me!"
Erich von Stroheim:  as a balloon vendor (although only in a deleted sequence). McTeague and Trina buy balloons from the vendor on the street.
The filming of the climax was actually the subject of an early silent newsreel. The facts reported by the newsreel concerning the Death Valley portion of the shooting: it took a day just to reach the location from the town of Keeler, California, they rode in a combination of cars and horses (one of the cars had the word "Greed" stenciled on it), water had to be rationed and they shot in August when temperatures were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
While doing research for the 'Eric von Stroheim' documentary The Man You Loved to Hate, filmmaker Kim Eveleth discovered a previously unknown cache of stills from the cut scenes of the director's aborted masterpiece "Greed", thus paving the way for the eventual restoration of the silent screen classic.
MGM's first feature-length movie.
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