LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Sasha Lovich Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Chester Conklin, Sylvia Ashton, Oscar Gottell, Otto Gottell, Frank Hayes, Tempe Pigott, Dale Fuller "Originally planned to run around ten hours but hacked to just over two by Thalberg's MGM, Erich Von Stroheim's greatest film still survives as a true masterpiece of cinema. Even now its relentlessly cynical portrait of physical and moral squalor retains the ability to shock, while the Von's obsessive attention to realist detail - both in terms of the San Francisco and Death Valley locations, and the minutely observed characters - is never prosaic: as the two men and a woman fall out over filthy lucre, their motivations are explored with a remarkably powerful visual poetry, and Frank Norris' novel is translated into the cinematic equivalent of, say, Zola at the peak of his powers." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out Selected by Guillermo Del Toro, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Simon Louvish, Carol J. Clover, Antonio Rodrigues.

SusanJL What a ridiculously overrated waste of film!!! This film - at over 2 hours - is still W-A-Y too long! I can't imagine 9 hours!!!!! This is like a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode, but he could have filmed it in 30 minutes easily and made it infinitely better. Such sappiness at the beginning, as Marcus gives up his girlfriend to Mac. Are you kidding me??? Who does that? Not a rat like Marcus, that's for sure!! And I couldn't believe Mac let Trina hoard the money for SO long. A normal husband would have forced her to spend the money instead of leaving, and then later killing her. He could have smashed that trunk open easily!!! And no normal man would not try to get some kind of job, especially back then when men were expected to support their families. Very little in this movie was believable. I didn't like any of the characters, so I didn't really care what happened to them at all!! In fact, this movie should be re-titled "Stupidity".

tieman64 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.

Frances Farmer I saw this movie in a cinema with a good print and live piano accompaniment so my viewing conditions were optimal. Overall, it was not the treat I had hoped for. There are some interesting moments and in the last scenes the movie takes you on quite an odyssey... but the heavy-handed didacticism and clumsy overacting torpedoed the film for me. Many silent films have exaggerated acting to compensate for the lack of sound, but for some reason it feels strikingly over the top in "Greed." Again and again we are given the message that greed is terrible, corrosive, a disease... but what else is new? With megabanks like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, etc. busily doing "God's work" all over the globe nothing has changed since 1924...For me, the most satisfying aspect of this movie is that no one comes out looking good -- they're all scum trapped in their various downward spirals. But we could have gotten the benefits of Von Stroheim's bleak moral vista with more nuance and variety along the way. Instead, you'll walk out of this movie feeling like you've been beaten over the head with what you already knew only too well.