In a sentenceWe came away feeling rather better about our bank balance
Money and jealousy draw John McTeague (Gibson Gowland), Trina (Zasu Pitts) and Marcus (Jean Hersholt) into conflict. Their lives become bound up with questions of possession: what belongs to whom, what someone else has, and what each person feels entitled to keep. Maria (Dale Fuller) and Mother McTeague (Tempe Pigott) are among the people surrounding them. Adapted from a novel by Frank Norris, the drama follows the pressure that wanting and keeping money places on relationships, with resentment growing between people whose lives are already entangled.
Erich von Stroheim’s drama makes money and jealousy painfully absorbing. The surviving film has awkward joins and presses its point too hard, but Gibson Gowland and Zasu Pitts keep its cruelty disturbingly human.
Greed is a harsh, engrossing drama, worth the discomfort even in its uneven surviving form. Erich von Stroheim’s adaptation of a novel by Frank Norris takes money and jealousy seriously enough to make both unpleasant to watch. He gives wanting, resenting and keeping things the attention that a crime film might reserve for the crime itself. At 140 minutes, it demands patience with people whose company becomes increasingly difficult, and sometimes asks for more patience than it has earned.
Gibson Gowland gives John McTeague enough human weight that we do not simply sit there waiting for him to behave badly. Zasu Pitts’s Trina and Jean Hersholt’s Marcus are equally important: their resentment feels personal, however firmly the film invites us to condemn it. The performances make these people worth watching after they have become difficult to like. There is a risk of reducing them to examples of bad behaviour, and the actors resist it.
Cinematographers Ben F. Reynolds and William H. Daniels give the compositions a deliberateness that rewards sustained attention. The location shooting helps keep the characters’ ugliness from making the whole film feel artificially arranged to prove a point. These people seem to belong to somewhere that would exist without their quarrels. Stroheim’s production design contributes to that impression, giving material surroundings enough importance that the actors cannot simply overwhelm them.
We found the jealousy oppressive, and more recognisable than we wanted to admit. Gowland, Pitts and Hersholt make resentment seem close enough to ordinary dissatisfaction that we cannot comfortably dismiss their characters as monsters. Their performances account for much of the discomfort: we understand the feelings even when we recoil from the people having them. Stroheim’s vicious irony can become overbearing, particularly when we have already understood what is making someone behave so badly.
The surviving film was drastically shortened, and its storytelling does not always recover from that treatment. Frank E. Hull and Joseph Farnham are credited as editors, though an editing credit is no reason to assign them every fault in a film subjected to such extensive cuts. Some stretches feel hurried beside the detailed attention given elsewhere. The interruptions to the rhythm matter, and knowing about the missing material cannot supply the experience of watching it.
The screenplay credits belong to Stroheim and June Mathis, and the insistence on money’s destructive effects occasionally leaves too little for us to discover. We have understood the danger before the film has finished pressing it. The music credited to William Axt and Leo Kempinski supports the severity without making the experience much gentler. A little relief would have helped, especially when the patient attention to character gives way to another forceful reminder of the damage that acquisitiveness can do.
As a crime drama, this offers little of the comfortable pleasure of waiting for bad behaviour to be punished. Its interest in resentment makes the watching more awkward than that, and its age offers no reassuring distance from the behaviour on screen. We would make time for it despite the awkward joins, though anyone looking for a brisk plot should choose something else. Keep it for an evening when you can bear to have your own small grudges examined.
The reviews are strongly positive, with praise clustering around von Stroheim’s detailed portrayal of jealousy, money and destructive behaviour. Critics single out the story’s vicious irony, its location shooting and its carefully composed images. Across accounts of both the shortened film and the reconstruction, the consensus is that the surviving material retains considerable force despite the drastic cuts. The restoration also draws praise for making the story’s scale and detail clearer.
There is no outright dissent among these six reviews; the reservations concern how much of the original remains lost. The Los Angeles Times praises the reconstruction’s expanded context and the integration of still-image montages with surviving footage. Variety likewise welcomes the added scenes and stills, but stresses that they cannot fully recover the original. The distinction is chiefly between enthusiasm for what survives and caution about what reconstruction can achieve.
The review presents the film as an epic that established von Stroheim’s reputation as a genius who could not be trusted. It singles out the story’s vicious irony and the studio’s drastic cuts to his original vision.
Read the full review →Thomas finds the reconstructed Greed greater than ever and praises its expanded context. He singles out the still-image montages and transitions for integrating the recovered material smoothly with Stroheim’s footage.
Read the full review →Brody presents the film as a masterwork and a portrait of American madness. He singles out its climactic struggle over gold in Death Valley as one of cinema’s greatest set pieces.
Read the full review →The review calls von Stroheim’s film a true masterpiece despite its drastic shortening. It singles out the surviving work’s greatness, while noting that MGM cut it from a planned ten hours to just over two.
Read the full review →McCarthy praises the restoration as a triumph that vividly reveals the film’s scale and detail, while noting it cannot fully restore the lost original. He singles out the added scenes and stills, especially their more illuminating portrayal of the film’s second half.
Read the full review →Nathan regards the surviving film as a masterpiece despite its mutilated form. He praises Stroheim’s intricate portrayal of jealousy and money, reinforced by location shooting and striking compositions.
Read the full review →
The Treasure of the Sierra MadreAnother corrosive study of money, with suspicion doing most of the damage.
L'Argent · not on Fi1m yetMoney passes between strangers, and the damage travels well beyond its owners.
The Servant · not on Fi1m yetClass resentment makes a household increasingly uncomfortable, with precise performances throughout.
Pather PanchaliFor equally patient attention to material hardship, with considerably more tenderness.
A Simple PlanFound money gives ordinary people persuasive reasons to become worse than expected.
