Greed is always thought of as the one that got away (from The Man You Love to Hate): what might have been, had MGM and Thalberg not cut Stroheim's carefully plotted 9-1/2 hour original? "Greed exists primarily as an idea about filmmaking which has passed among directors and writers, critics and moviegoers," Klawans writes. "A reputation for exhaustive veracity...is a large part of this legend." In a carefully described context of the twenties, Klawans shows how Greed was "the anti-folly....By an act of sabotage, Stroheim had in effect tried to break the system of production." The director abandoned the studio to shoot on the actual locations in Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague, so for us Greed offers a fascinating look at old San Francisco, Oakland, and, famously, Death Valley. But the naturalist moniker, while it was Stroheim's own, is misleading, for in "filming the raw swirl of nobody's America," he creates a horrific poetry of the post-Gold Rush West as it stretched towards its bourgeois prize.