Silent Greed

Eric Stroheim's silent film (1924) on America's obsession with money was a 10 hour long odyssey. MGM producers managed to slim it down to an hour and forty minutes.

From The New Yorker ("Critic's Notebook"):

[The film] magnifies one California couple's striving rise and craven fall into an inferno of American madness. [Stroheim] moves Frank Norris's 1899 novel--about McTeague, a gold miner turned unlicensed dentist, and Trina, his best friend's girl, whom he makes his fluttery bride--to 1908 and the years before the liberating agonies of the First World War and Hollywood's universal pageantry. Showing the masses at their most unwashed, Stroheim captures a heaving, struggling, stinking world of rugged labor, precarious comfort, and primitive naivete. the ladder of social mobility goes both ways, and the terrifying decline that ends in one of the greatest of all cinematic set pieces--a struggle over gold, under the hellish sun of Death Valley--is set up by a banal catastrophe, unemployment. In the bare wild, Stroheim saw an old world--but not its evils--end.