It's pretty tiresome to watch 4 hours of black and white silent movie, which was cut to 2 hours 70 years ago and then, in our time, restored to original length by using photos from shooting to replace lost material...But it is definitely worth your patience.At the beginning it may seem too stretched and even boring, but as you watch for some time it starts to pull you in and all shortcomings slowly fade from sight until you are left with strong impression.........................

Erich von Stroheim directs "Greed", a classic of silent cinema. Famously shot on over 440 reels of celluloid, only to have over four hundred and thirty reels slashed by mega-studio Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, the film has been shown over the decades with wildly differing running-times, some cuts running between eight and ten hours long, some four hours and some a mere one hundred and twenty minutes. MGM eventually burnt most of the film's footage in 1957, supposedly to free up storage space (and extract silver nitrate from "Greed's" film-stock). Stroheim died that same year. In 1999, American producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed "Greed" using Stroheim's preproduction material and continuity script (dated March, 1923). Using photographs, stills and title-cards, his cut attempted to restore the film to Stroheim's original intentions. As Schmidlin's cut still barely resembles Stroheim's mammoth 9 hour "director's cut", "Greed" is typically classified as a "lost film".Epic in scope, "Greed" revolves around a gang of friends, one of whom is failed gold miner Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland). After winning a lottery, the gang progressively destroy one another, some losing their minds, jobs, and some subjecting the others to various forms of inhumanity, betrayal and violence. Sounds straightforward? The film is actually very nuanced (the MGM cuts reduce the film to sensational silliness), though you wouldn't know this from any of the shorter cuts of the film. Whole subplots and chunks were removed such that Stroheim's rich canvas gets condensed into a fairly mundane, melodramatic love triangle. The film's longer cuts, however, hint at a better picture, with numerous little scenes and rich details. What becomes apparent in these cuts is that the film's title refers not only to gold, money and sex, but to all desire, which turn Stroheim's characters into grotesque little schemers. Born in Austria, Stroheim skewers a very specific set of American myths – liberty, independence, individualism, Manifest Destiny – as his film portrays masses of immigrants adsorbed by a United States which swallow identities, bulldozes cultures and breeds insular pockets. Everyone here is motivated by a creed of self-interest and self-protection, hoping and hoping and scrambling over the hopes of others. One gets the sense of a compulsive busyness but a fundamental emptiness, the false promise of endless opportunity matched by a fear of being cast permanently adrift.Not strictly Expressionistic, the film nevertheless contains very big, expressionistic strokes, which attempt to convey a kind of festering cruelty, which grows and grows before consuming totally. The film ends in Death Valley, two men scrambling for a gun in a desert, their only witness a starving donkey. The film's heavily influenced everything from "The Good The Bad And The Ugly" to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" to "There Will Be Blood" to "Seraphim Falls".?/10 - For silent film aficionados only. For decades (and even to this day) the film was mocked for being about Stroheim's own greedy need for reels upon reels of footage and film. Whether Stroheim's six and four hour cuts (which he favoured) play well today is unknown.

Greed(1925) was based on a novel that was in the tradition of great long novels like Crime and Punishment or War & Peace. The director, Erich Von Stroheim wanted to do a faithful adapation of the book McTeague because of his fascination with the theme of greed. He did do a faithful adaption but ended up paying a stiff price for his drive towards perfection. Marvelous film that is one of the 100 greatest films of all time. The acting is terrific and the story is compelling to follow.Gibson Gowland does a convincing job in the role of Dr. McTeague. Like many of the director's early films, Greed(1925) was severely cut. Original running time of the movie was nine hours. Its a disgrace that we will never see the full cut ever resurface in the theaters or DVD. One of the best films from the 1920s(besides Metropolis) to suffer at ridiculous cuts at the hands of the censors and studios.

In early 1900s California, brash bird-loving Gibson Gowland (John "Mac" McTeague) wants a better life than his California mining family. After becoming a San Francisco dentist, Mr. Gowland falls in love with penny-pinching patient ZaSu Pitts (as Trina Sieppe), who had been dating her cousin and Mr. Gowland's only friend, Jean Hersholt (as Marcus "Marc" Schouler). Gowland marries the unusually thick-wigged Ms. Pitts, and Mr. Hersholt puts his animosity on the back burner. Temporarily. Eventually, Gowland, his wife, and friend are all consumed by "Greed".Money changes everything.Erich von Stroheim was likely impressed with Barry O'Neil's 1916 "Life's Whirlpool" (a "lost" film with surviving stills showing "Greed" imagery) and read Frank Norris' source novel "McTeague" (1899). Mr. von Stroheim intended to film the entire book, which resulted in a marathon movie, running over nine hours; this is the "mutilated masterpiece" film buffs drool over, but everyone including von Stroheim knew it was too long. Probably, the real loss occurred when MGM further cut the version finalized by Rex Ingram, with von Stroheim's blessing.The root of all evil.The 1999 reconstructed version, by Rick Schmidlin for "Turner Classic Movies" (TCM), is excellent. It re-creates, using hundreds of film stills, the nine-hour version. At four hours, it's manageable in one sitting; however, the unenlightened may find it tedious. Sometimes the color is garish, and the glorious "full color" photographs of "Old Grannis" and "Miss Baker" seems anachronistic. After only ten minutes, it's obvious that MGM cut scenes of great artistic worth, presumably from the version prepared by Mr. Ingram. Indeed, "Greed" was a butchered film.******** Greed (12/4/24) Erich von Stroheim ~ Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller