Greed is a 1924 American silent film, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on Frank Norris's novel McTeague. The film depicts three protagonists who succumb to their darker nature over a mutual desire for a lottery prize of $5,000 in gold (screenshot pictured). Von Stroheim shot more than 85 hours of footage, using sophisticated techniques such as deep-focus cinematography and montage editing, and obsessed over accuracy during production. Greed was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location. Two months were spent shooting in Death Valley for the final sequence and many of the cast and crew became ill. Originally almost eight hours long, Greed was edited against von Stroheim's wishes to about two-and-a-half hours by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio heads Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. The cut footage is lost, and still sought after by film archivists and historians. Numerous false claims of the original version's discovery have been made over the years. In 1999, a reconstructed four-hour version was released using surviving stills from the lost footage. (Full article...)
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