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Bookmark this pageGreed (1923)
Director: Erich von Stroheim
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Originally planned to run around ten hours but hacked to just over two by Thalberg's MGM, von Stroheim's greatest film still survives as a true masterpiece of cinema. Even now its relentlessly cynical portrait of physical and moral squalor retains the ability to shock, while the Von's obsessive attention to realist detail - both in terms of the San Francisco and Death Valley locations, and the minutely observed characters - is never prosaic: as the two men and a woman fall out over filthy lucre (a surprise lottery win), their motivations are explored with a remarkably powerful visual poetry, and Frank Norris' novel is translated into the cinematic equivalent of, say, Zola at the peak of his powers. Never has a wedding been so bitterly depicted, never a moral denouement been delivered with such vicious irony.Author: GA
Cast & crew
Director: Erich von Stroheim
Producer: Louis Mayer
Cast: Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Tempe Pigott, Frank Hayes, Dale Fuller full cast
Duration: 7 mins
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