Based on the Frank Norris novel McTeague, Greed is the story of a miner who sets up shop as a dentist on San Francisco's Polk Street, his sordid marriage to a woman obsessed with her lottery winnings, and his ultimate demise in the middle of the desert. Stroheim's original, highly experimental 42-reel film was cut to the commercial release version.
“Greed belongs dead center in any reconsideration of the Western as a genre dealing with life and imagination in the West. In its slow abandoning of claustrophobic interiors for insane openness, it exposes the fearful yearning to be bourgeois, happy and rich in those who have moved west to primitive instincts that will not be civilized. As a couple marry, death's theatre troops by outside, viewed through the naturalistic window. Gold--‘bright and yellow, hard and cold'--is the ostensible demon, but it finds its ironic equivalent in the furnace brightness of Death Valley, where the two male rivals will die, manacled together in destructive brotherhood. The desert is crazies' gold, ridiculing the rings, coins and gold teeth.
“The unique blend of psychological melodrama and gestural insight in Stroheim's pictures epitomizes a culture refusing to submit to real or ordinary life. (Isn't that why Americans deserted Europe? Isn't the ‘range' a metaphysical necessity to Americans?) The epic archetypes of the nineteenth century will not subside: the realism of Polk Street and Oakland gives way to the desert ordeal. California, where movies are dreamed up, made and then, like Greed, trashed, is cut off from America by desert. Its great cities live with that insecurity, as well as with dread of earthquake or the violent ardor of their inhabitants. Greed comes from a realist novel, but it is a testament to the continuing importance of the frontier as a fantasy.” David Thomson