Joseph Farnham thus pared it to 2 1/4 hours over the objections of von Stroheim, and this is the version we know today. Nonetheless, it was the first feature-length film from MGM. Many decades later, Turner Classic Movies padded the running time to four hours using production stills and additional title cards.
The cut footage was all lost, though rumors persist that Cinémathéque Française has a four-hour version (the so-called June Mathis cut, before Farnham pruned it further). Perhaps because of the edits, but more likely because of its gloomy story, Greed was a box office failure, though MGM undoubtedly recovered its costs long ago from video sales. Von Stroheim's next film was MGM, The Merry Widow, was a hit, so their contentious relationship does have something of a happy ending.
As for the film itself, it stars Gibson Gowland as McTeague, a burly, curly-haired San Francisco dentist. McTeague's best friend is Marcus (Jean Hersholt), a genial fellow who is dating a cousin, Trina (Zasu Pitts). McTeague meets and falls in love with Trina, and after an awkward courtship the feeling is mutual. She wins a $5,000 lottery and marries Trina, two events that make Marcus fume with jealousy.
Marcus gets his revenge by informing the state of California that McTeague has no dental license. He loses his practice, is unable to keep a job, takes to drink, and physically abuses the increasingly miserly Trina. The couple drift into poverty since Trina is unwilling to part with any of her stash of gold coins.
Eventually, the frustrated McTeague murders Trina and steals her gold coins. He flees San Francisco for Death Valley, where he is pursued by Marcus. The adversaries have a final confrontation in the extreme desert heat.
How others will see it. The backstory of MGM slicing away three-quarters of von Stroheim's first cut dominates discussion of the movie. Some regard the heavy studio cuts as one of cinema's great tragedies. The battle between von Stroheim and MGM is typical of many director versus studio and art versus box office struggles. Cinemaphiles rarely side with the studio.
Thus, praise for Greed is often intended to support von Stroheim's vision, which no one alive has seen, rather than the released studio-hacked product. The fame of the movie ensured its inclusion in the National Film Registry, which took place in its third year, 1991.
At imdb.com, the film has a surprisingly low 5K user votes, but the median grade is an extremely high nine out of ten. The user votes decline with age: 8.4 under 30, 8.2 under 45, and 7.1 over 45. In the latter age group, a huge gender gap exists: 7.6 from men and 4.7 from women. Women presumably found McTeague highly unromantic, disapproved of his murder of Trina, and disliked the eventual characterization of Trina as a cunning miser.
How I felt about it. A Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), two of the most famous silent movies, were both over three hours long. In retrospect, von Stroheim should have planned for a film of such length all along. The subplot of the beggar Maria and junkman Zwerkow should have been scrapped, since it weakly echoes the saga of McTeague and Trina, and the romance between the two elderly neighbors belongs in a different film. One that few would bother to see.
It is a shame that most of von Stroheim's was scrapped by the studio. But it is unlikely that it would have made the movie on par with, for example, Chaplin's The Gold Rush. Certainly what we have left is a good movie, as von Stroheim clearly was a gifted directed. But he let the theme, the love of money corrupts all, dictate the evolution of the characters to extremes and their unhappy demise.