Erich Von Stroheim's "Greed"
Greed's Missing Hours
My article on "Greed's" missing pieces.
Greed Reconstructed
The six hour reconstructed version.
Background
On various aspects of the story and film.
Greed Picture Book
Stills and photos from "Greed" and Von Stroheim's career.
Links
Silents, Von Stroheim, Pitts, Norris, San Francisco, et al.
 | Erich von Stroheim's 1924 epic motion picture "GREED" |
This is a cozy library shelf of material for and about Erich Von Stroheim's great work and tangential material to help increase the understanding and appreciation of the film Greed. The story begins in San Francisco.In 1899 Frank Norris published his book about ordinary people in America. He called it McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. It was a simple, realistic and sober story of American life and based on incidents Norris was familiar with as a student at Berkeley.
In 1909 Erich von Stroheim left Austria and came to New York and in 1914 he wound up in LA, crewing on DW Griffith's Birth of A Nation.
During WW I Von Stroheim played dastardly German officers in the heavy-handed anti-German propaganda films then being churned out in Fort Lee, New Jersey. At the time anti-German hysteria turned sauerkraut into "liberty cabbage" and schools abolished German language studies.
And then in 1917 Von Stroheim suddenly found himself out of work, blacklisted, a victim of the jingoism and hysteria his own screen portrayals had helped to fuel. It was an era of the legal repression of unofficial thought, and concerned citizens questioned his Americanism.
Out of work, on the skids and holed up in a dingy west side rooming house in New York City, Von Stroheim found a copy of McTeague that a previous tenant had left behind. The story touched a chord, and Von Stroheim experienced an epithany of sorts.
Luckily for Von Stroheim --- and us --- DW Griffith then returned to New York from France with footage to finish a humanitarian film cast against the war. Griffith needed Von Stroheim, and they went to LA, where in a very short time Von Stroheim began directing his own feature films with artistic and box office success.
In 1923 Von Stroheim filmed Norris' story on location in San Francisco and Death Valley. He renamed it Greed, and it was his masterpiece.
Then for business, political and personal reasons Von Stroheim's bosses, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, took the footage away from him and released an amputated version.
But their deliberate debasement has not tarnished its luster, and Von Stroheim's gem is still one of film's premier works.
If you have any suggestions, links, notes, .jpg, .gif or anything that you would like to add, please post me. Otherwise, browse around, link up and enjoy.
My Want List
- a detailed street map of San Francisco c. 1925, paper or .jpg
- a copy of the tinted release of Greed
- footage or negative of Stroheim's original ten-hour epic (no questions asked)
