That Eric von Stroheim’s enduring adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 naturalistic novel McTeague was ever made at all is something of a minor miracle.   America, in 1923, was in the midst of a decade-long party instigated by the ill-advised Volstead Act of 1919 which prohibited the sale of alcohol throughout the country.  The 20s became known as the roaring twenties, not only for the way the newly affluent population so enthusiastically exchanged the austerity of the war years for the glamorous carousing of the flapper era, but for the unbridled optimism spawned by a financial and industrial boom that seemed as though it would last forever.   While F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the exploits of thinly-veiled facsimiles of the characters at the heart of this hedonistic fervour, in Hollywood the likes of Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch were producing light-hearted social comedies that seemed to capture perfectly the mood of the era.

In direct contrast to such light froth, von Stroheim’s faithful adaptation of Norris’s heavyweight tome remained true to its naturalistic style and seemed to revel in the drabness of life among the underclass in turn of the century America.   He deliberately avoided star names recognisable to the general public, choosing instead to cast relative unknowns in key parts.   The role of McTeague was given to Gibson Gowland a hulking, heavy-set man with an unruly mane of hair and brutish features, while Zasu Pitts played his penny-pinching wife.

Shooting of the film began in January 1923, and continued until October of the same year – an exceptionally long shoot for the 20s.   It has been speculated that von Stroheim must have written the film’s screenplay with Norris’s book open by his side, slavishly re-creating each scene and copying each line of dialogue verbatim – an obsessive pursuit which would account for the original version’s outlandishly long running time.   His original script included a thirty-page prologue which equated to around one hours screen time, showing McTeague’s formative years in a gold-mining camp, his father’s violent alcoholism, and his apprenticeship to a traveling dentist.   These scenes were shot in and around the Big Dipper Mine in northern California, but were excised from the theatrical version and are no longer in existence.

The film was shot by Ben Reynolds and William Daniels entirely on location in the streets and boarding houses of San Francisco, in Death Valley, and in the Northern California hills.   Von Stroheim went to great lengths to capture the look of San Francisco of the 1890s, prior to its decimation by the earthquake of 1906 and subsequent fires.   And yet the actor’s costumes, the street traffic and incidents were all from the period 1908-1922, leading to the suggestion from Richard Koszarski in his book The Man You Love to Hate: Eric von Stroheim and Hollywood, that von Stroheim combined Norris’s events with the chronology of his own life in America (von Stroheim arrived on its shores in 1909).

The seminal scenes from the film are those that take place in Death Valley.   It took the crew of thirty-nine men and one woman a day to reach the location of the shoot from the town of Keeler, California by car and horse.   Filming of these scenes took place in August when temperatures were over 100’ Fahrenheit, and filming of the shoot was so strenuous that Jean Hersholt, who played McTeague’s love rival Marcus Shouler, had to be hospitalised after losing 27 pounds.

The film was finally completed in October 1923.   It had cost more than half-a-million dollars – three times its original budget.   Now that the film was in the can, von Stroheim could have been forgiven for believing the worst was behind him, but he now faced another gargantuan task.  

On 12^th January 1924 MGM executives sat through the entire 9+ hour, 42 reel version of the film – and weren’t pleased by what they saw.   They asked von Stroheim to reduce the film to a more realistic running time that could be distributed in two parts.   A disgruntled von Stroheim went away to see what he could do.   However, he was only paid to direct the film, and had to mortgage his home and sell his car to support himself while he edited the film down to twenty-two reels (approximately five hours).

This vastly reduced version was completed by March 1924, but was still considered too long.   Unable to see how he could trim the film any further, von Stroheim turned to his friend and fellow director Rex Ingram.   Together with editor Grant Whytock, who had previously worked with von Stroheim on The Devil’s Passkey, Ingram reduced the film to eighteen reels by eliminating some minor sub-plots.   Both Ingram and von Stroheim felt that this was the absolute minimum (approximately four hours) that it could be cut to without destroying continuity. 

Unfortunately for von Stroheim, the merger of Goldwyn Pictures with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions had taken place between the first and final edits and Mayer passed responsibility for the film to von Stroheim’s old adversary Irving Thalberg.  He had title writer Joseph Farnham, who had read neither the novel nor the shooting script, edit the film down to ten reels, and all excised footage was destroyed so that the stock’s silver content could be reclaimed.

Although Greed, which was the newly-formed MGM’s first feature, made a modest profit at the box office and received moderately positive critical reviews, it was considered a commercial failure.   Von Stroheim disowned the theatrical version – he didn’t even see it until 1950 when Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française persuaded him to view a copy.   He commented afterwards that, ‘This was like an exhumation for me. In a tiny coffin I found a lot of dust, a terrible smell, a little backbone and shoulder-bone.’   Of the editor who cut the film down to two hours, von Stroheim supposedly said, ‘The only thing he had on his mind was his hat!’

Von Stroheim’s next film was The Merry Widow, of which he wrote:

When I saw how the censors mutilated my picture Greed, which I did really with my entire heart, I abandoned all my ideals to create real art pictures and made pictures to order from now on. My film The Merry Widow proved that this kind of picture is liked by the public, but I am far from being proud of it and I do not want to be identified at all with the so-called box-office attractions. So I have to quit realism entirely. . . . When you ask me why do I do such pictures I am not ashamed to tell you the true reason: only because I do not want my family to starve.

In 1972, film critic Herman G. Weinberg, a close friend of von Stroheim’s, published The Complete Greed, a book which included 348 still photographs and 52 production stills left to him by the director.  

The original 42 reel version now has the dubious honour of being one of the top ten ‘lost films’ of the American Film Institute.

[ADD]

Sources: The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. Contributors: Lewis Jacobs - author. Publisher: Harcourt Brace. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1939.pp346-349; A History of Narrative Film. Contributors: David A. Cook - author. Publisher: W. W. Norton. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1996. Page Number: 227-232