Greed (film) - Legacy

Legacy

In his final years, Stroheim said that "of all my films, only Greed was a fully realized work, only Greed had a total validity." In 1926 a British foundation of Arts and Sciences requested a copy of the original version of Greed to keep in their archive, but their request was denied.

Among those who have praised Greed over the years are Sergei Eisenstein, Joseph von Sternberg, who said "We were all influenced by Greed, Jean Renoir, who called it "the film of films", and Ernst Lubitsch, who called Stroheim "the only true 'novelist'" in films. Jonathan Rosenbaum has claimed that Greed was a major influence on such films as The Crowd, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, The Magnificent Ambersons, To Have and Have Not, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Rear Window, L'avventura, Les Bonnes Femmes and Mikey and Nicky. Rosenbaum singled out American director Elaine May as being especially influenced by Stroheim and in addition to Greed's influence on Mikey and Nicky he made strong comparisons between A New Leaf and Blind Husbands, The Heartbreak Kid and Foolish Wives and Ishtar and The Merry Widow.

In 1950, Henri Langlois screened the studio version of the film for Stroheim. Stroheim said "it was for me an exhumation. It was like opening a coffin in which there was just dust, giving off a terrible stench, a couple of vertebra and a piece of shoulder bone." He went on to say that "It was as if a man's beloved was run over by a truck, maimed beyond recognition. He goes to see her in the morgue. Of course, he still loves her but it's only the memory of her that he can love — because he doesn't recognize her anymore."

In 1952 Sight and Sound magazine published its first list of the "10 Greatest Films ever made". Greed was tied for 7th place on that list. In 1962 it was tied for 4th on the same list. Since 1972 it has failed to reach a spot on the top ten. In 1958 at the Brussels International Exposition, the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique named Greed as one of the twelve greatest films ever made, along with Battleship Potemkin, Bicycle Thieves, The Gold Rush, The Passion of Joan of Arc, La Grande Illusion, Intolerance, Mother, Citizen Kane, Earth, The Last Laugh and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When they revealed this list the Cinémathèque published Stroheim's original, uncut script for Greed, which came directly from Stroheim's personal copy preserved by his widow Denise Vernac.

In 1978 the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique released a list of "The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films of all time." Greed was third on their list after Citizen Kane and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. In a University of Southern California list of the "50 Most Significant American Films" made by the school's Performing Arts Council, Greed was listed as number 21.

In 1991 Greed was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In 1999, Turner Entertainment (the film's current rights holder) decided to "recreate", as closely as possible, the original version by combining the existing footage with still photographs of the lost scenes, in accordance with an original continuity outline written by Stroheim. This restoration runs almost four hours and was produced by Rick Schmidlin.