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" |
Greed's Six Missing Hours
by Michael Mills
Exaggerated Publicity
The stories of Stroheim's Hollywood career have been wildly exaggerated. The tales of lavish production costs were studio publicity. Some publicity stories that eventually became legend were that he spent lavish amounts on undergarments for extras, that he spent lavish amounts on buttons, that he waited around on the set waiting for chimney smoke to billow in the appropriate manner.
The salacious rumors of libido run rampant on Von Stroheim's sets were a tease played up by the newspapers to promote the box office and their own circulation. There were rumors around town that extras in a bordello scene were genuine professionals from LA's sporting houses and that the on camera reaction shots were quite genuine, but far from the truth. The slightly erotic tales were churned to grab front page headlines and generate audience excitement for the next release.
The stories were fiction, and the fact was that Von Stroheim was a conservative, bland and decidedly old world Austrian. Ironically, the same studio publicity stories and street corner rumors, used to promote Von Stroheim at Universal later would be used to damn Von Stroheim at MGM.
Greed
Greed is the struggle of ordinary people at the turn of the 20th century in San Francisco. The story in the two hour MGM version has a simple plot, in which greed, instability, drink and a bit of mental deficiency destroys a young married couple after the wife wins $5000 in the lottery.
Jealousy poisons their friend Marcus, who has the husband's dental practice shut down in spite. The sweet, young wife, Trina Sieppe, then becomes a hoarding miser, and her husband, the burly, oaf John McTeague slowly is consumed by poverty and drink. Soon the marriage dissolves, and the story ends with their ruin and death.
Von Stroheim's Greed was not just based on Frank Norris' 1899 novel McTeague: Von Stroheim filmed everything in the book. He wanted to bring all the subplots and characters to the screen and to breath life into Norris' realistic humanistic vision of life. And above all, Von Stroheim wanted to tell the truth. The movie Greed was Stroheim's passion, and the film he dedicated to his mother.
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