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McTeague, son of degenerate parents from a California mining town, is torn between a propensity for violence and more gentle impulses. When a traveling dentist visits the town, McTeague is inspired to take up a career in dentistry and leaves his native mining town to set up practice in San Francisco. When his best friend Marcus refers his current romantic interest, Trina Sieppe, to him to have a broken tooth repaired, McTeague finds himself powerfully attracted to her and struggles against the impulse to molest her while she lies unconscious in the dental chair. He confesses his feelings to Marcus, who agrees to step aside and allow McTeague to woo Trina; eventually the two get married. After Trina wins a lottery, she is transformed into a pathological miser and resentment flares up between McTeague and Marcus...

"Greed" is a film of superlatives: regarded as "a masterpiece" by George Sadoul, "the film of films" by Jean Renoir, or "the greatest of all films" by Jean Cocteau and praised by S.M. Eisenstein, Ernst Lubitsch or Joseph von Sternberg, it is also one of the most mutilated film, and one of the biggest box-office bombs, of all times. Decades later even in its truncated form, “Greed” is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

"Greed" is director Erich von Stroheim's passion project, an over 10 hour work from the 1902 novel McTeague by Frank Norris. After the film was cut to about a fifth of its run time, much to the heartbreak of von Stroheim, the extracted footage was mostly lost. Many decades later, Turner Classic Movies padded the running time to four hours using production stills and additional title cards.

Director: Erich von Stroheim
Cast: Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller, Chester Conklin
Country: USA

DVD9 | NTSC 4:3 | 03:58:52 | 7.66 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English intertitles
Subtitles: none
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Western