The Vancity Theatre is proud to present an extremely rare screening of Erich von Stroheim's legendary 1924 classic, Greed. Not just one of the greatest productions of the silent era, Greed is a regular fixture on lists of the best films ever made— it ranked in ninth place in the Cahiers du Cinema poll in November 2008.

Despite such acclaim, this landmark film has never been issued on DVD. An adaptation of the Frank Norris novel "McTeague", Greed was conceived as the first mature Hollywood masterpiece, a film that would set new standards in psychological realism and artistic expression.

Von Stroheim produced an original cut that ran over eight hours — to the horror of MGM. The studio slashed the film to just 140 minutes, and destroyed much of the excised footage (according to the director, to extract the silver from the silver-nitrate film stock). In 1999 producer Rick Schmidlin (who restored Touch of Evil) put together this four-hour reconstruction drawing on never-before-seen footage, the original shooting script, 650 production stills and intertitles, and a new score by Robert Israel.

Rick Schmidlin will introduce our special screening of the reconstructed Greed and share his archive of von Stroheim materials in the lobby, including the screenplay, private correspondence and rare stills.

"This revelatory four-hour version of Erich von Stroheim's Greed represents a triumph of film restoration. An enormously successful attempt to rehabilitate one of the two or three most celebrated and mourned mutilated masterpieces in cinema history, Rick Schmidlin's loving work of scholarly craftsmanship [clarifies] the film's true dimensions and the staggering depth of its detail."— Todd McCarthy, Variety

Note: There will be an intermission during this screening.