Erich von Stroheim – Greed (1924)

The first rough cut of Greed allegedly ran around 8-9 hours. Von Stroheim submitted a 5 hour version to MGM, who eventually cut it down to 2+ hours after Irving Thalberg – who had fired von Stroheim when they both worked at Universal – was placed in charge of post-production following the Metro/Goldwyn merger. Von Stroheim disowned this version of the film, but it is the only surviving version known to exist. Even in its truncated form, Greed is considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

In 1999, producer Rick Schmidlin (fresh off the success of his restoration of Touch of Evil) and editor Glenn Morgan created a “reconstructed” version for Turner, using the shooting script as a reference and cutting in production stills with explanatory title cards to show some of the things that had been cut. This cut runs at 4 hours, but nearly half of it consists of still frames. Invaluable as a document of what was lost, but more of a companion piece to the surviving 2 hour cut.

As of 2021, the only commercially available version of the film is the 1999 reconstruction, which can be found on iTunes and airs occasionally on TCM. The last official release of the 1924 edit was a 1990 laserdisc. The 1999 edit utilized a new transfer of the film, though it was only ever rendered in standard definition as it was intended for broadcast, not theatrical release. No cut of the film has ever been officially released on DVD or BluRay.

Greed (Theatrical Cut Edit).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 19 min
Size: 	2.26 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 761 kb/s
BPP: 	0.166
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 265 kb/s (Carl Davis Score (1986))
#2:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 279 kb/s (Robert Israel Score (1999))

https://nitro.download/view/0BB5A8AA39F05B5/Greed_(Theatrical_Cut_Edit).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/12EF802D7642CFA/1990_Laserdisc_Intro.mkv

Language(s):Silent
Subtitles:None