We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Trina's insane passion for hoarding money finally ruins them and drives all love and kindliness from McTeague. When she refuses him money for carfare in a terrific rainstorm, he bites her fingers until she finally agrees to give him a few coins from her hoarded wealth.
greed degrades man until he is little more than an animal— and Norris' novel, and Stroheim's picturization of it, proved it powerfully and forcefully.
Stroheim's insistence on the ultimate in "realism" is of course legendary. When he wanted scenes of home life in a San Francisco apartment, he moved his cameras and crew into a San Francisco apartment. All the locations used were just those described by Norris in his book. Even the murder scene was staged in a building where a similar murder had taken place. And the climactic sequences in Death Valley were literally sweated out— slowly, and painfully— in Death Valley under a blazing sun, with no shade or comfort to be found on the crusty white salt flats that form the floor of the valley. Most of the crew were taken quite ill at one time or another— Jean Hersholt spent months recuperating in a hospital from a particularly unpleasant eruption of blisters that grew under the skin. Stroheim drove everybody mercilessly, and whether it was from loyalty, admiration of his unquestioned genius, or sheer hatred and a determination to show him that they couldn't be licked, he drew performances from his
players and work from his cameramen that they never equalled under any other director.
And when it was all over, there was Stroheim with miles and miles of film, which he finally edited down to forty reels. If audiences couldn't be expected to sit still for eight hours, he argued, why not release the film in two parts? Not surprisingly, perhaps, the answer was no. He had started the film under Sam Goldwyn's sponsorship, but now Goldwyn had merged with Metro, and Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were in the driver's seat. Louis B. Mayer had very definite ideas about what made movies tick, and uncompromising realism wasn't one of them. Thalberg had fired Stroheim from his last Universal movie (Merry Go Round) and had little sympathy for or patience with him. Stroheim was in for a fight and he knew it. He finally compromised by getting his film down to twenty reels— a long film by any standards, even today's, but not an impossibly long one. However, for a film as grim and depressing as McTeague, its seemed to Thalberg and Mayer to be entirely too much of a good thing. They took it away from Stroheim, renamed it Greed, and cut it down to ten reels. Stroheim, seeing the work on which he had expended so much love, effort and —yes, genius— thus treated, withdrew with screams of "butchery" and heated curses about the mentality of
49