Greed (film)

Greed
Directed by	Erich von Stroheim
Produced by	Irving Thalberg Louis B. Mayer
Written by	June Mathis Erich von Stroheim
Based on	McTeague by Frank Norris
Starring	Gibson Gowland Zasu Pitts Jean Hersholt Dale Fuller Tempe Pigott Sylvia Ashton Chester Conklin Joan Standing Jack Curtis
Music by	William Axt
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Metro-Goldwyn
Release date(s)	December 4, 1924 (1924-12-04)
Running time	600 mins. (original cut) 140 mins. (original release) 239 minutes (restored)
Country	United States
Language	Silent film English intertitles

Greed is a 1924 American dramatic silent film. It was directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller, Tempe Pigott, Sylvia Ashton, Chester Conklin, Joan Standing and Jack Curtis.

The plot follows a 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 von Stroheim (shooting screenplay) and Joseph Farnham (titles) from the 1899 novel McTeague by Frank Norris. (The onscreen writing credit for June Mathis was strictly a contractual obligation to her on the part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the parent studio), as she was not actually involved in the production.) Originally over ten hours long, Greed was ultimately edited against von Stroheim's permission to about two and a half hours, and the full-length version is a lost film.

Production

The story of the making of the movie has become a Hollywood legend. The story had been filmed once before by an American film studio, William A. Brady's World Pictures, in 1916 under the title McTeague starring Broadway star Holbrook Blinn. 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 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 — one of the most costly films yet made (though Stroheim's 1921 film Foolish Wives was publicized by Universal as costing over a million). Realizing it was far too long to be shown, Stroheim cut it down to six hours, to be screened with intermissions in two nights. However, Goldwyn producers told him to cut it to a more manageable length. With the assistance of fellow director Rex Ingram and editor Grant Whytock, von Stroheim trimmed the film to about four hours, to be shown in two parts.

However, during production, Goldwyn was merged into MGM. After screening it at full length once to meet contractual obligations, MGM removed Greed from von Stroheim's control despite his protests. The negative was given to MGM's head scriptwriter, June Mathis, with orders to cut it even further. Mathis gave the print to a routine cutter, who reduced it to 2.5 hours. In the process, key characters were removed from the final version so that it could be screened in a reasonable time frame. This created large gaps in continuity. Existing prints of Greed run at about two hours and twenty minutes.

Although Mathis' actual involvement in the cutting has never been confirmed, she was credited as a writer due to contractual obligations, and thus Stroheim blamed her for destroying his masterpiece. However, Mathis had worked with Stroheim before and had long admired him, so it is not likely she would have indiscriminately butchered his film.

The hours of cut film were destroyed by a janitor cleaning a vault who thought they were unimportant film rolls and threw them in an incinerator^{[citation needed]} (although it appears that much of it survived until at least the late 1950s)^{[citation needed]} , 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; panned by critics and angrily disowned by von Stroheim. 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 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). In 1991, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^{[citation needed]}

Cast

• Gibson Gowland as John McTeague
• ZaSu Pitts as Trina
• Jean Hersholt as Marcus
• Dale Fuller as Maria
• Tempe Pigott as McTeague's mother
• Jack Curtis as McTeague's father (uncredited)
• Silvia Ashton as 'Mommer' Sieppe
• Chester Conklin as 'Popper' Sieppe
• Joan Standing as Selina

Uncredited

Trina and McTeague

• James F. Fulton as Prospector Cribbens
• Cesare Gravina as Junkman Zwerkow
• Frank Hayes as Charles W. Grannis (The Modern Dog Hospital proprietor)
• Austen Jewell as August Sieppe
• Hughie Mack as Mr. Heise (harness maker)
• Tiny Jones as Mrs. Heise
• J. Aldrich Libbey as Mr. Ryer
• Reta Revela as Mrs. Ryer
• Fanny Midgley as Miss Anastasia Baker
• S.S. Simon as Joe Frenna
• Max Tyron as Uncle Rudolph Oelbermann
• Erich von Ritzau as Dr. Painless Potter
• William Mollenhauer as Palmist
• William Barlow as The Minister
• Lita Chevrier as Extra
• Edward Gaffney as Extra
• Bee Ho Gray as Extra and Knife Thrower used in saloon scene
• Harold Henderson as Extra
• Florence Gibson as Hag
• James Gibson as Deputy
• Oscar Gottell as A Sieppe twin
• Otto Gottell as A Sieppe twin
• Hugh J. McCauley as Photographer
• Jack McDonald as Placer County Sheriff
• Lon Poff as Man from the Lottery Company
• Erich von Stroheim as Balloon vendor
• James Wang as Chinese cook

References

• Article in Film Monthly, December 1999

External links

• Greed at the Internet Movie Database
• Greed is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Greed at AllRovi
• Greed at Rotten Tomatoes
• Literature on Greed
• Production photographs from Greed, The Bancroft Library
• Greed at silentera.com database
• Roger Ebert on Greed