Greed (1924)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Zasu Pitts is an absolute marvel, absolutely marvelous in the role of avaricious wife. Watch her face: She is not only unexpectedly very pretty, she is incredibly expressive.Cast usually as the scatter-brained and/or neurotic foil, she showed in "Greed" she could have remained a serious actress.Unfortunately, whatever it was that motivated her character is told, very unsatisfactorily and very uncinematically, in one intertitle, sometimes called a title card.Perhaps the fault is that the original version, as created by director Erich von Stroheim -- and running 6 to 8 hours! -- spelled it out better, and perhaps even explained her more-than-neurotic reaction to her new husband, and apparently to the impending sexual activities expected of brides, but no motivation is given us audience in the badly cut-down version.On a recent (14 June 2015) airing on TCM, "Greed" ran about 2 hours and 15 minutes, and it could have been cut further. The sexual neurosis, so unexplained, could and should have been cut out, since there was never any resolution, and some other scenes, especially some badly edited scenes or shots, could have been eliminated or re-cut.Still another option, as suggested on a discussion board, is to show the original 42 reels as a TV mini-series. I like that idea, very much. It could give us the complete von Stroheim feeling and probably explain all that is now missing.Other than the acting, and every performer is great, and occasional clever camera angles, and some spectacular scenery, I can't really recommend "Greed," except to film fanatics (like myself) and lovers of film history.

I don't know many times I've seen this. Along with everyone else, I agree that the full version must have been powerful beyond words, but what we have here is probably the best possible product of the nearly impossible task of reduction. For that, I'm profoundly thankful. There were several parallel stories in the original script, some rather interesting, a few of not much interest at all. The major story of McTeague and his wife is the strongest and we can only guess (through the version we have now) what was going on around the central characters. In this respect, the truncated version is acceptable, given the time frame. This film was presented on television with stills and narrative inter-titles from the original and it wasn't really very successful. The rhythm was askew, of course, and things didn't "gel" at all. My big gripe is that this should be available on DVD. Why the foot-dragging?Curtis Stotlar

Erich von Stroheim directs "Greed", a classic of silent cinema. Famously shot on over 440 reels of celluloid, only to have over four hundred and thirty reels slashed by mega-studio Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, the film has been shown over the decades with wildly differing running-times, some cuts running between eight and ten hours long, some four hours and some a mere one hundred and twenty minutes. MGM eventually burnt most of the film's footage in 1957, supposedly to free up storage space (and extract silver nitrate from "Greed's" film-stock). Stroheim died that same year. In 1999, American producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed "Greed" using Stroheim's preproduction material and continuity script (dated March, 1923). Using photographs, stills and title-cards, his cut attempted to restore the film to Stroheim's original intentions. As Schmidlin's cut still barely resembles Stroheim's mammoth 9 hour "director's cut", "Greed" is typically classified as a "lost film".Epic in scope, "Greed" revolves around a gang of friends, one of whom is failed gold miner Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland). After winning a lottery, the gang progressively destroy one another, some losing their minds, jobs, and some subjecting the others to various forms of inhumanity, betrayal and violence. Sounds straightforward? The film is actually very nuanced (the MGM cuts reduce the film to sensational silliness), though you wouldn't know this from any of the shorter cuts of the film. Whole subplots and chunks were removed such that Stroheim's rich canvas gets condensed into a fairly mundane, melodramatic love triangle. The film's longer cuts, however, hint at a better picture, with numerous little scenes and rich details. What becomes apparent in these cuts is that the film's title refers not only to gold, money and sex, but to all desire, which turn Stroheim's characters into grotesque little schemers. Born in Austria, Stroheim skewers a very specific set of American myths – liberty, independence, individualism, Manifest Destiny – as his film portrays masses of immigrants adsorbed by a United States which swallow identities, bulldozes cultures and breeds insular pockets. Everyone here is motivated by a creed of self-interest and self-protection, hoping and hoping and scrambling over the hopes of others. One gets the sense of a compulsive busyness but a fundamental emptiness, the false promise of endless opportunity matched by a fear of being cast permanently adrift.Not strictly Expressionistic, the film nevertheless contains very big, expressionistic strokes, which attempt to convey a kind of festering cruelty, which grows and grows before consuming totally. The film ends in Death Valley, two men scrambling for a gun in a desert, their only witness a starving donkey. The film's heavily influenced everything from "The Good The Bad And The Ugly" to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" to "There Will Be Blood" to "Seraphim Falls".?/10 - For silent film aficionados only. For decades (and even to this day) the film was mocked for being about Stroheim's own greedy need for reels upon reels of footage and film. Whether Stroheim's six and four hour cuts (which he favoured) play well today is unknown.

In early 1900s California, brash bird-loving Gibson Gowland (John "Mac" McTeague) wants a better life than his California mining family. After becoming a San Francisco dentist, Mr. Gowland falls in love with penny-pinching patient ZaSu Pitts (as Trina Sieppe), who had been dating her cousin and Mr. Gowland's only friend, Jean Hersholt (as Marcus "Marc" Schouler). Gowland marries the unusually thick-wigged Ms. Pitts, and Mr. Hersholt puts his animosity on the back burner. Temporarily. Eventually, Gowland, his wife, and friend are all consumed by "Greed".Money changes everything.Erich von Stroheim was likely impressed with Barry O'Neil's 1916 "Life's Whirlpool" (a "lost" film with surviving stills showing "Greed" imagery) and read Frank Norris' source novel "McTeague" (1899). Mr. von Stroheim intended to film the entire book, which resulted in a marathon movie, running over nine hours; this is the "mutilated masterpiece" film buffs drool over, but everyone including von Stroheim knew it was too long. Probably, the real loss occurred when MGM further cut the version finalized by Rex Ingram, with von Stroheim's blessing.The root of all evil.The 1999 reconstructed version, by Rick Schmidlin for "Turner Classic Movies" (TCM), is excellent. It re-creates, using hundreds of film stills, the nine-hour version. At four hours, it's manageable in one sitting; however, the unenlightened may find it tedious. Sometimes the color is garish, and the glorious "full color" photographs of "Old Grannis" and "Miss Baker" seems anachronistic. After only ten minutes, it's obvious that MGM cut scenes of great artistic worth, presumably from the version prepared by Mr. Ingram. Indeed, "Greed" was a butchered film.******** Greed (12/4/24) Erich von Stroheim ~ Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller