General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Greed (1924 film)

Greed is a 1924 American silent drama film directed by Erich von Stroheim, adapted from Frank Norris's 1899 naturalist novel McTeague, and best known as silent cinema's most famous lost film: the director's original cut ran roughly nine and a half hours, while the version MGM released runs about two hours.¹^•² It stars Gibson Gowland as the dentist McTeague, ZaSu Pitts as his wife Trina, and Jean Hersholt as Marcus Schouler, whose friendship and marriage are destroyed after Trina wins a lottery.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and source	Erich von Stroheim, adapting Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague; the second film adaptation of the novel after Life's Whirlpool (1917)¹^•⁴
Original cut	A 42-reel preview screened on 12 January 1924 ran about nine and a half hours; von Stroheim later reduced it to about 24 reels²^•⁵
Release version	Cut by MGM to 10 reels, about 140 minutes (Rotten Tomatoes lists 2h 8m); premiered 4 December 1924 at New York's Cosmopolitan Theater⁶^•³^•⁵
Production	Nine months of shooting produced roughly 200,000 feet of negative at a cost of about $470,000, almost entirely on location in San Francisco, Oakland, Placer County, and Death Valley⁷
Commercial result	The released film recouped less than half its budget⁸
1999 reconstruction	Rick Schmidlin's four-hour version for Turner Entertainment inserted more than 600 still photographs of deleted scenes into the surviving footage⁹
Standing	Ranked =185 in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll¹

Spoilers

Story and adaptation

The film follows John McTeague, a miner who leaves the Big Dipper Gold Mine in Placer County, California, to become a dentist in San Francisco, where he befriends Marcus Schouler and marries Marcus's cousin and former fiancée, Trina Sieppe.⁴^•¹⁰ When Trina wins five thousand dollars in a lottery, Marcus accuses McTeague of having married her for the money; Trina becomes obsessed with hoarding her winnings and refuses to spend them even as the couple falls into poverty.¹¹ Marcus takes revenge by informing the authorities that McTeague practices dentistry without a license, destroying his livelihood, the friendship, and the marriage; the story ends with murder and a final confrontation in Death Valley.¹¹^•¹²

Von Stroheim described his method as a literal transposition: "I decided to make an absolutely literal film transposition of a novel that has been accepted as a classic of American literature... I made it so that it could be said, 'As Norris wrote it, so von Stroheim produced it.'"⁵ The film's opening title card moves the story to 1908, and a wanted poster near the end dates Trina's murder to December 1922, fourteen years later, although Norris's novel is set in the late nineteenth century.⁵ The studio's early title was Greedy Wives, before June Mathis's title Greed was adopted.⁵^•¹³

Production on location

Von Stroheim insisted on filming at or near the places Norris described; a contemporary account stated that "not one single scene was produced or filmed in the studio."⁵ Because the Polk Street district of San Francisco had burned after the 1906 earthquake, he leased a late nineteenth-century building at 602 Hayes Street that matched the novel's description in detail, and had his staff remodel its storefronts and rooms to fit the story.⁵ The production also used the 1909 Cliff House, the Ferry Building, Market Street, and the San Francisco Orpheum Theatre, then moved to Oakland and to the Big Dipper mine near Colfax, which scouting found barely changed since Norris wrote about it.⁵

Death Valley. A stipulation in Norris's contract with World Films required the ending to be shot in Death Valley, California, rather than faked in a studio.⁵ The studio and its insurance company had warned von Stroheim against filming there, and conditions were severe: Jean Hersholt lost 27 pounds during the climax's shooting and had to be hospitalized.⁵^•⁷ By December 1923, after seven months on location, the production had exceeded one million dollars by one contemporary account.⁵ Silent Era's summary puts the final cost at about $470,000 with roughly 200,000 feet of exposed negative.⁷

The cutting of the film

Von Stroheim's first assembly ran about 47,000 feet, which he refined to 45,000 and then to about 42,000 feet, the 42-reel version he previewed to a small group on 12 January 1924.⁷^•² He then cut it to 24 reels, intending release in two parts of 12 reels each, and refused to cut further; his friend, the director Rex Ingram, reduced it to 18 reels, and June Mathis reduced it to 10 reels with new intertitles explaining the deleted material.⁵^•¹⁴ Joseph W. Farnham received screen credit as editor of the release version, supervised by Harry Rapf and Irving Thalberg.⁷

The excised footage was destroyed. According to von Stroheim, MGM burned it to extract the few cents' worth of silver in the nitrate film stock, so the released version contains the only surviving footage of the film.⁸ The reduction removed entire subplots, including the junk dealer Zerkow and his wife Maria, and required many added intertitles so that the picture became, in one contemporary account, at times a mere verbal representation of the story.⁵^•¹⁴

Reception and afterlife

The film premiered on 4 December 1924 at New York City's Cosmopolitan Theater, which William Randolph Hearst leased to Metro-Goldwyn because he considered it "absolutely the most powerful motion picture" he had ever seen.⁵ New York critics were largely impressed: the New York Journal called it "an epic of almost ruthless realism," the Daily News deemed it "one of the most conspicuous pictures of all times," and the Daily Mirror called it "a masterpiece."⁵ Reception was not uniform; the trade paper Harrison's Reports called it the filthiest, vilest, most putrid picture in the history of the motion picture business, and Photoplay's James R. Quirk called it sordid, brutal, and repulsive while still judging it a masterpiece of direction.¹⁰^•⁵ Commercially it failed: the released film recouped less than half its budget, and sources differ over whether it was a major loss maker or turned a small profit.⁸^•¹⁰

Reputation. The film's standing grew over decades. A panel of international critics in 1958 rated it among the dozen best films of all time, and it placed =185 in Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films.¹⁵^•¹ The American Film Institute put the lost footage at number one on its list of the Ten Most Wanted Lost Films, and the missing hours have been called the Holy Grail of cinema.⁹^•¹¹ A 35mm positive print exists in the George Eastman Museum film archive, and the film is in the public domain in the United States.⁷

The 1999 reconstruction. In 1999, producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed the film for Turner Entertainment and Turner Classic Movies, using the 10-reel release version, von Stroheim's final shooting script of 31 March 1923 as a blueprint, and more than 600 production stills of deleted scenes inserted to restore the narrative.⁹^•¹⁶ The reconstruction runs a little over four hours, close to the length of von Stroheim's final cut of roughly four and a half hours, and also reconstituted his color scheme, which had made substantial use of Handshiegl Process natural-color effects, with the aid of recently discovered test frames.¹⁶ Schmidlin stated that the version is a reconstruction of the lost narrative structure rather than an attempt to recreate a director's cut.¹⁶ The reconstruction won a prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for its meticulous reconstruction and the Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics.¹⁷

Legacy

What survives is considered a milestone for its fusion of naturalism and melodrama, and the film's influence is traced in later works: the Death Valley showdown's sudden generic shift has been seen as foreseeing the bleak violence of westerns from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) to There Will Be Blood (2007), and directors including Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder named Greed among their ten favorite films.¹^•⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026