Greed

Erich von Stroheim's mutilated masterpiece — originally over nine hours long, cut by the studio to two, with the excised footage destroyed forever. What survives is still one of the most powerful American films ever made. A simple, amiable dentist in San Francisco marries his best friend's girl after she wins the lottery. The money poisons everything: the wife descends into pathological miserliness, the friendship curdles into murderous jealousy, and the final act — a desperate chase into Death Valley, filmed on location in 130-degree heat — is one of cinema's most nightmarish sequences. Stroheim's unsparing naturalism, his refusal to soften or sentimentalize, his obsessive attention to the squalid details of lives coming apart — it all feels shockingly modern. The great mutilated masterpiece of American cinema, and even in its truncated form, utterly devastating.