Erich Von Stroheim's "Greed"
 | Erich von Stroheim's 1924 epic motion picture "GREED" |
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Click here to go toThis is a cozy library shelf of material for and about Erich Von Stroheim's great work and tangential material to help increase the understanding and appreciation of the film Greed. The story begins in San Francisco.
In 1899 Frank Norris published his book about ordinary people in America. He called it McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. It was a simple, realistic and sober story of American life, based on incidents Norris was familiar with as a student at Berkeley.
Erich von Stroheim left Austria in 1909 for New York and by 1914 he was in LA crewing on DW Griffith's Birth of A Nation.
During WW I, Von Stroheim played dastardly German officers in the heavy-handed anti-German propaganda films then being churned out in Fort Lee, New Jersey. At the time anti-German hysteria was turning sauerkraut into "liberty cabbage" and schools were abolishing German language studies.
And then suddenly in 1917 Von Stroheim found himself out of work, blacklisted, a victim of the jingoism and hysteria his own screen portrayals had helped to fuel. It was an era of legal repression of unofficial thought, and concerned citizens had questioned his Americanism.
Out of work, on the skids, and holed up in a dingy West Side rooming house in New York City, Von Stroheim found a copy of McTeague that a previous tenant had left behind. The story touched a chord, and Von Stroheim experienced an epithany of sorts.
Luckily for Von Stroheim --- and us --- DW Griffith then returned to New York from France with footage to finish a humanitarian film cast against the war. Griffith needed Von Stroheim, and they went to LA, where in a few short years Von Stroheim was directing his own feature films with artistic and box office success.
In 1923 Von Stroheim filmed Norris' story on location in San Francisco and Death Valley. He renamed it Greed, and it was his masterpiece.
Then for business, political, and personal reasons Von Stroheim's bosses, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, took the film away from Von Stroheim and released an amputated version.
But their deliberate debasement did not tarnished its luster, and Von Stroheim's gem is still one of film's premier works. However after watching the 1999 restoration version, you'll quickly realize that a landmark creative work of the 20th century was cut and mangled beyond recognition by some very short-sighted people.
