A 1924 silent film directed by Erich von Stroheim, based on the novel ''McTeague''. Particularly noteworthy as one of the earliest examples of various "troubled production" tropes, the film's original cut came in at a stunning ''nine and a half hours''. {{MGM}} eventually took the film out of von Stroheim's hands and released it with a running time of about two and a half hours. The shortened film was a flop, panned by critics and disowned by its director.
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!!This film provides examples of:
* CreatorBacklash: von Stroheim famously disavowed the studio's cut.
* DevelopmentHell
* DownerEnding
* DudeShesLikeInAComa: [=McTeague=] feels up Trina while she's out cold in his dentist's chair.
* EpicMovie
* ExecutiveMeddling: It's hard to blame MGM, really. Audiences, then and now, will not sit through nine-hour movies.
** To be fair, it could have been serialized into shorter segments. It does seem like Stroheim wanted to make an {{HBO}}-style drama but had the bad luck of making it 70 years before that would be possible.
** It has been said that von Stroheim had a [[IncrediblyLamePun footage fetish]]--the original cut was ''nine'' hours long.
*** The nine hour cut was meant as a work print only. Stroheim felt that run time was far too long and personally cut it down to about four hours, which he wanted to show over two nights.
* TheFilmOfTheBook
* GoldFever
* LoveTriangle: Gone horribly wrong.
* MissingEpisode: The full cut of ''Greed'' is sometimes regarded as the "Holy Grail" of lost films. The seven hours of footage cut for its initial release were apparently incinerated by a janitor cleaning a film vault.
* MoneyFetish: Trina dumps the gold coins on her bed and rolls around in them.
* ReCut: A "restored" version was released that combined the existing footage with still pictures from the production. It runs nearly four hours.
* SanFrancisco: Shot on location.
* StaggeredZoom: The chilling last shot, where the film zooms out to show McTeague handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of a desert.
* ThanatosGambit: As [=McTeague=] beats him to death in the desert, Marcus handcuffs them together.
* ThirstyDesert: It's called Death Valley for a reason.
* WantedPoster: This is pretty much all the segue there is from Trina's murder to the last sequence of [=McTeague=] fleeing into the desert. This is one of the biggest cuts in von Stroheim's film--a long section where [=McTeague=] goes back home to see his parents again was taken out of the movie.
* WorthlessYellowRocks: You got the gold. Mazel tov. Too bad you're in the middle of a ''desert'' with no ''water'' and handcuffed to a dead guy.
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