Greed (film)
A 1924 silent film directed by Erich von Stroheim, based on the novel McTeague. Particularly noteworthy as one of the earliest examples of various "troubled production" tropes, the film's original cut came in at a stunning nine and a half hours. MGM eventually took the film out of von Stroheim's hands and released it with a running time of about two and a half hours. The shortened film was a flop, panned by critics and disowned by its director.
This film provides examples of:
- Creator Backlash: von Stroheim famously disavowed the studio's cut.
- Development Hell
- Downer Ending
- Dude She's Like in A Coma
- Epic Movie
- Executive Meddling: It's hard to blame MGM, really. Audiences, then and now, will not sit through nine-hour movies.
- To be fair, it could have been serialized into shorter segments. It does seem like Stroheim wanted to make an HBO-style drama but had the bad luck of making it 70 years before that would be possible.
- It has been said that von Stroheim had a footage fetish--the original cut was nine hours long.
- The Film of the Book
- Gold Fever
- Love Triangle: Gone horribly wrong.
- Missing Episode: The full cut of Greed is sometimes regarded as the "Holy Grail" of lost films. The seven hours of footage cut for its initial release were apparently incinerated by a janitor cleaning a film vault.
- Money Fetish
- Re Cut: A "restored" version was released that combined the existing footage with still pictures from the production. It runs nearly four hours.
- San Francisco: Shot on location.
- Staggered Zoom: The chilling last shot, where the film zooms out to show McTeague handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of a desert.
- Thanatos Gambit
- Thirsty Desert
- Wanted Poster
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: You got the gold. Mazel tov. Too bad you're in the middle of a desert with no water.