Greed (1924) | Directed by Erich von Stroheim - Full Movie

The sudden fortune won from a lottery fans such destructive greed that it ruins the lives of the three people involved.

Greed is a 1924 American silent drama film written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague. It stars Gibson Gowland as Dr. John McTeague, ZaSu Pitts as Trina Sieppe, his wife, and Jean Hersholt as McTeague's friend and eventual enemy Marcus Schouler. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina.

Greed was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location, with Stroheim shooting approximately 85 hours of footage before editing. Two months alone were spent shooting in Death Valley for the film's final sequence, and many of the cast and crew became ill. Stroheim used sophisticated filming techniques such as deep-focus cinematography and montage editing. He considered Greed to be a Greek tragedy, in which environment and heredity controlled the characters' fates and reduced them to primitive bêtes humaines (human beasts), a naturalistic concept in the vein of Zola.

Directed by: Erich von Stroheim
Screenplay by: Erich von Stroheim
Contractually credited: June Mathis
Based on: McTeague by Frank Norris
Produced by: Erich von Stroheim, Abe Lehr, Irving Thalberg
Starring: Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt
Cinematography: Ben F. Reynolds, William H. Daniels
Edited by: Erich von Stroheim, Frank Hull (42-reel and 24-reel versions)
Rex Ingram, Grant Whytock (18-reel version), June Mathis, Joseph W. Farnham (10-reel version)
Music by: William Axt
Production company: The Goldwyn Company–Metro-Goldwyn
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date: December 4, 1924
Running time: Over 9 hours, (first cut), 140 minutes (original release) 239 minutes (reconstruction)
Country: United States
Languages: Silent film, English intertitles
Budget: $665,603
Box office: $274,827