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I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

. . . as its Jewish Villainess is meant to illustrate the Bible verse, "The love of Gold is the root of all Evil." When Trina chances upon a hoard of gold coins, she is even less willing to part with one of them than Smaug the HOBBIT dragon. Worse yet, she bludgeons blind beggars to death in order to steal the cents in their tin cups. (This scene was among the seven hours of deleted footage contained on my GREED "director's cut" disc set.) Trina is shown here shopping at the "Semite Market," paying a nickle for a week's worth of rancid family dinner meat that her butcher says has been rejected by the mongrel alley dogs. Since Erich Von Stroheim was Hitler's second-favorite movie director, it's not hard to picture the future Fuhrer watching all nine hours of GREED again and again, taking breaks only to scribble another chapter of his MEIN KAMPF rant now and then. America's TCM TV Channel occasionally runs GREED late at night in the belief that not everyone who views its edited 129-minute version will become a Genocidal Megalomanic Fascist Dictator. Let's hope that they're right about that!

To Clarify, this is a review of the 4-hour TCM version of Greed.From the very first few minutes in Greed, one can understand that this is no ordinary morality tale or an extremely long picture exploring the habituality of human nature. This is the film that I believe to be Erich von Stroheim's magnum opus, and one of the greatest losses of any form of artwork in the world (the full uncut version that is).To dissect any film regardless of its stature, one must first look at the macro-elements of the picture and see what can gleaned from them. The narrative of the film is no ordinary linear single story; von Stroheim has created the TV mini-series long before it was ever conceived. With the main plot following McTeague and Trina, there are two other sub-plots which are not necessarily important to the main one, but as a whole, culminate to give the general majesty of the film including the novelesque features and underlying message of human greed. The narrative is structured heavily as von Stroheim wanted to perfectly recreate the novel on which Greed was based (McTeague, 1899); each plot compliments the other perfectly and mesh together at certain points with each one giving off their own message at its end. Then there are the Micro-elements to inspect. For Greed, von Stroheim wanted to create a raw and dirty atmosphere that fitted perfectly with the overall feeling of the narrative and settings; so one will notice that the camera-work throughout consists generally of close-ups and other shots that seem to make the characters seem garish in some sort of fashion. And the same can be said about the lighting choices for the film, usually von Stroheim chooses a hard and powerful light as if trying to show every crooked detail of his characters faces; and in the other instances, von Stroheim uses a dark and gloomy lighting as if to mask characters in the scenes in which they are about to commit the evil. The performance given by all of the central characters is perfect for the style that von Stroheim needed. One may not think that they are all fantastic actors, but they don't need to be, most of them succumb to madness, or in the case of McTeague: inebriation. The actors commit themselves to the general feeling and message of the film which is more than any respectable director can ask for. The editing, all things considered, is still very good with the stills from the cut scenes so that we can recreate the sub-plots that were cut from the original release. But unfortunately we can only imagine how grand and to what level of effort would have been given to the original 8-hour von Stroheim version of Greed, some of which we can already see from the colour of gold in any scene in which it is featured.Hopefully one day, someone will find an original cut in a basement of an asylum in Croatia (or some other random place), but until that time we are stuck with a 4-hour masterpiece that may not be the original, but is still absolutely magnificent. Greed is one of the six films ever created that I rate a straight 10 out of 10, so if that doesn't encourage you to watch this film, I don't know what will.

Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague is one of the key works in American literary naturalism, featuring several hallmarks of the literary movement, which flourished around the turn of the century. Erich Von Stroheim's adaptation, retitled Greed, strictly adhered to the novel and the original nine hour cut must have been a scene for scene translation. This closeness of the film to the source material means that Greed carries over some of naturalism's key themes. Specifically, the film is about John McTeague, a miner's son who attempts to better himself by becoming an apprentice in a trade—dentistry—but ultimately finds himself doomed to failure as mining is what he was meant to do. This combination of determinism and social Darwinism is typical of naturalism's focus on the lack of autonomy of individual humans. Another characteristic of naturalism evident in Greed is a sort of primitivization of human beings as both John McTeague and his father are constantly dirty and covered in masses of unkempt hair. Similarly, in one of Von Stroheim's most inspired scenes, some clever editing compares McTeague's rival Marcus to a cat preparing to prey on a couple of helpless caged canaries. Another key theme of Greed is…greed, which wrecks the lives of the three principal characters. McTeague's love interest Trina is a hard working, thrifty girl who remains relatively happy until she wins a substantial sum in a lottery, after which she becomes a miserable miser as she strives to increase her small fortune. This infuriates the formerly happy-go-lucky Marcus, who gracefully bowed out of a semi-engagement with Trina to make his friend McTeague happy. His opportunism is amplified into psychosis as he realizes he's missed his chance to share a part of Trina's fortune. The money even ruins McTeague himself, who finds it impossible to work for menial wages when his household possesses enough wealth to allow him a relatively leisurely life if only he could convince his wife to use it. The other important characters in Greed are two diametrically opposed couples: there is the greedy couple Zerkow and Maria, who dream of fabulous wealth and the elderly couple Grannis and Miss Baker, who are too busy working to notice each other. Zerkow suspects Maria is hiding money from him and it drives him mad while Grannis sells his business (for the same amount Trina won in the lottery) and settles down to retirement with Miss Baker. The never subtle Norris uses these subplots to posit two possible future future paths for McTeague and Trina. Contrary to my focus on themes common to the novel and film, Greed is not merely an extension of Norris's novel. Von Stroheim makes the film his own as he sets the proper tone with colored filters, carefully controlled zooms, and some reasonably well put together editing. In fact, his filmmaking is considerably more adept than Norris's workmanlike prose. The climactic scenes in Death Valley, which Von Stroheim shoots through a yellow filter, are particularly impressive and are easily among the best of the silent era. In spite of the carefully realized themes of McTeague, I did not enjoy the novel when I read it a few years ago. Like many works of naturalism, some of the character behavior seems stilted—probably to reinforce the idea that humans lack autonomy. Further, Norris's lack of style and his heavy-handedness in slathering on miserable situations make for a rather unpleasant reading experience, which to be fair is not atypical of my experiences with literary naturalism. The most problematic aspect of McTeague, though, is one I've already mentioned: the social Darwinism. It's always difficult to establish intent, even with a writer as heavy- handed as Norris, but it's tempting to see the novel as a snobby dismissal of an irredeemable lower class represented by the buffoonish and reprehensible McTeague. Yet, in spite of my dislike for McTeague, which caused me to stay away from this film for years, I found Greed quite impressive even with its often languid runtime, which is padded out with uncinematic production stills and expository title cards. Von Stroheim has a better sense of characterization and he manages to build some sympathy even for the mostly unlikeable characters here and he infuses the goings on with an epic quality mostly absent from the book. Somehow, Von Stroheim stayed true to a book I didn't like and made a film I found above average nonetheless.

Erich von Stroheim directs "Greed", a classic of silent cinema. Famously shot on over 440 reels of celluloid, only to have over four hundred and thirty reels slashed by mega-studio Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, the film has been shown over the decades with wildly differing running-times, some cuts running between eight and ten hours long, some four hours and some a mere one hundred and twenty minutes. MGM eventually burnt most of the film's footage in 1957, supposedly to free up storage space (and extract silver nitrate from "Greed's" film-stock). Stroheim died that same year. In 1999, American producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed "Greed" using Stroheim's preproduction material and continuity script (dated March, 1923). Using photographs, stills and title-cards, his cut attempted to restore the film to Stroheim's original intentions. As Schmidlin's cut still barely resembles Stroheim's mammoth 9 hour "director's cut", "Greed" is typically classified as a "lost film".Epic in scope, "Greed" revolves around a gang of friends, one of whom is failed gold miner Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland). After winning a lottery, the gang progressively destroy one another, some losing their minds, jobs, and some subjecting the others to various forms of inhumanity, betrayal and violence. Sounds straightforward? The film is actually very nuanced (the MGM cuts reduce the film to sensational silliness), though you wouldn't know this from any of the shorter cuts of the film. Whole subplots and chunks were removed such that Stroheim's rich canvas gets condensed into a fairly mundane, melodramatic love triangle. The film's longer cuts, however, hint at a better picture, with numerous little scenes and rich details. What becomes apparent in these cuts is that the film's title refers not only to gold, money and sex, but to all desire, which turn Stroheim's characters into grotesque little schemers. Born in Austria, Stroheim skewers a very specific set of American myths – liberty, independence, individualism, Manifest Destiny – as his film portrays masses of immigrants adsorbed by a United States which swallow identities, bulldozes cultures and breeds insular pockets. Everyone here is motivated by a creed of self-interest and self-protection, hoping and hoping and scrambling over the hopes of others. One gets the sense of a compulsive busyness but a fundamental emptiness, the false promise of endless opportunity matched by a fear of being cast permanently adrift.Not strictly Expressionistic, the film nevertheless contains very big, expressionistic strokes, which attempt to convey a kind of festering cruelty, which grows and grows before consuming totally. The film ends in Death Valley, two men scrambling for a gun in a desert, their only witness a starving donkey. The film's heavily influenced everything from "The Good The Bad And The Ugly" to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" to "There Will Be Blood" to "Seraphim Falls".?/10 - For silent film aficionados only. For decades (and even to this day) the film was mocked for being about Stroheim's own greedy need for reels upon reels of footage and film. Whether Stroheim's six and four hour cuts (which he favoured) play well today is unknown.