Greed.

When I first heard of the story of McTeague, being a film buff, I perused the Internet Movie Database to find out if anyone had every made a film version of the book.

In 1924, a man with an obsession set out to create an epic story that he claimed had actually inspired him to become a filmmaker. His name was Erich von Stroheim, and the novel that inspired him to become a visual storyteller was McTeague. His love for the novel was so great that the screenplay he wrote nearly copied the book from start to finish. The result? A film clocking in at around nine and a half hours long.

Not surprisingly, the producers would not release a nine and a half hour film, even if it cost them $500,000, an insanely large budget for the time. So out came the scissors, or rather, the chainsaw. The recut version ran at a modest two and a half hours, and is considered by many film critics to be one of the greatest pictures of all time. The title for the film?

Greed.

What an appropriate title. After reading the novel, there is no doubt why Stroheim would come to such a title. Considering the characters of the story, it only seems obvious. In the entire story, only one character seems unaffected by money, and that is the beloved Englishman Old Grannis. Even the most positive female character in the novel, Miss Baker, begins to hang around Trina less once the McTeagues have lost their income.

The five thousand dollars won in the lottery is a curse. As is often true in reality, money changes people. Norris would say that money causes people to revert to one of their baser human instincts: Greed. The survival of the fittest. Everyone must fight for a limited number of resources. Only the strongest will obtain these limited resources. The rest must fall in this creature's wake.

WC: 323