Greed

Erich von Stroheim filmed Frank Norris’s McTeague almost page by page, on real San Francisco streets and in Death Valley in high summer, and handed the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a picture that ran most of a working day. The studio cut it to ten reels. What survives is a wreck, and still one of the hardest films America has made. Gibson Gowland’s dentist is a big, slow, gentle man until money arrives; ZaSu Pitts makes Trina’s thrift a kind of lust. Nobody in the picture is spared, least of all the audience. Watch for the canary McTeague carries in its gilt cage all the way into the salt flats, the last living thing he owns.