Film

Greed

Name: Greed
Genre: Drama, Crime
Released: 1924
Cast: Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt, Dale Fuller, Tempe Pigott

Erich von Stroheim's silent epic follows a dentist, his wife, and the friend who covets her, as a lottery win curdles into obsession and murder. Shot with punishing realism — real slums, real heat, a real desert — it feels less like drama than a slow experiment in watching greed calcify into something monstrous. Bleak, deliberate, haunted by the hours the studio destroyed.

TMDb rating

7.3

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There Will Be Blood2007

Daniel Plainview's hunger for oil curdles into the same moral rot — a man hollowed out by acquisition until nothing human is left inside him. Paul Thomas Anderson gives von Stroheim's naturalism a modern, operatic scale.

But Nearly three hours of slow-burn dread with almost no likable characters and an ending some find deliberately, punishingly strange.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre1948

Three prospectors strike gold in the Mexican desert, and the friendship dissolves into paranoia exactly the way McTeague's marriage does — proof that money doesn't corrupt people so much as reveal what was always there.

But Humphrey Bogart's performance is deliberately unlikeable, and the pacing is old-Hollywood patient rather than thrilling.

A Place in the Sun1951

An adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy that shares Greed's DNA almost exactly: class, desire, and money quietly strangling two people who thought they'd escaped their circumstances.

But Its romantic melodrama softens the naturalist bite that makes Greed so bracing; this one wants you to feel for its doomed lovers.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse1991

Von Stroheim shot a nine-hour film the studio hacked down to two; Coppola nearly destroyed himself and his cast making Apocalypse Now. Both are stories about a director's obsession outrunning the film itself.

This documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now is the closest thing to watching Greed's own legendary, self-destructive production — a director's vision spiralling past reason, budget, and sanity, captured on actual film.

But It's a different film entirely, about Vietnam rather than avarice, and you'll need to already care about Apocalypse Now to feel the full vertigo.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse poster

Double Indemnity1944

Money and lust drive an ordinary man to murder in this founding noir — the same machinery as Greed, dressed in shadows and wisecracks instead of dust and desperation.

But It's slicker and funnier than Greed ever wants to be; if you want misery played straight, this isn't quite it.

Chinatown1974

Water instead of gold, but the same rot underneath a sunbaked California — private detective Jake Gittes uncovers the kind of institutional greed that dwarfs any one person's avarice.

But The plot is deliberately labyrinthine, and its bleakness lands harder if you already know the twist going in.

Wall Street1987

Gordon Gekko's belief that greed is good is the very idea Greed spends two hours quietly refuting — a glossier, louder look at the same appetite eating a man from the inside out.

But It's a slicker, more forgiving film than Greed — style and swagger where von Stroheim offered only dust.

Requiem for a Dream2000

Four separate downward spirals, each fuelled by the pursuit of something — money, love, a body, a high — filmed with an intensity that matches Greed's relentless, punishing momentum.

But It's viscerally upsetting and stylistically hyperactive — closer to a nightmare than to Greed's slow, deliberate rot.

Nightmare Alley2021no page yet

A carnival grifter's ambition curdles into something monstrous as he claws his way up — a glossy, gothic cousin to McTeague's slow moral collapse, with a con man instead of a dentist.

But Guillermo del Toro's version is gorgeous and stylised where Greed is grimy and plain; the tone leans closer to fable than document.

The Lost Weekend1945

Billy Wilder's unflinching study of an alcoholic's disintegration shares Greed's appetite for watching a person come apart in real, unglamorous detail, without music to soften the fall.

But It's a smaller, more intimate story — addiction rather than avarice — and its ending is gentler than Greed allows itself.

A Simple Plan1998

Same engine as Greed — found money turning ordinary people into liars, then into something worse — just restaged as a lean, snowbound American thriller instead of a silent epic.

Two brothers find cash in a crashed plane and spend the rest of the film discovering exactly how much of themselves they're willing to lose to keep it. Tense, plain, quietly devastating.

But It's a tighter, more conventional thriller than Greed — less interested in social rot, more in one bad decision compounding.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World1963

Take Greed's premise — ordinary people wrecked by the promise of money — and run it through slapstick instead of tragedy. Same diagnosis of human nature, delivered as a joke instead of a warning.

A busload of strangers race across America chasing buried treasure, and the film is basically Greed's thesis played for maximum farce — everyone becomes awful, just loudly and hilariously instead of quietly.

But It's nearly three hours of broad, dated slapstick; if you want Greed's grim seriousness, this is its total opposite.