SOURCE: "Thematic Differences between Norris's McTeague and von Stroheim's Greed," in Literature Film Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1990, pp. 96-102.

In the following essay, Dean discusses the differences between Stroheim's Greed and the original novel on which it was based.

The surprisingly few critics who have compared Frank Norris's novel McTeague and Erich von Stroheim's film adaptation Greed invariably assume that Norris is an imitator of Emile Zola rather than an author with his own thematic program, and they fail to take into account von Stroheim's consistent Judeo-Christian sin/punishment ethic that informs all his other films. The common belief is that von Stroheim's adaptation is a sentence-by-sentence reconstruction of an ersatz Zola novel. I wish to compare McTeague and Greed once again with a greater awareness of both artists' thematic agendas. To illustrate the differences between the novel and film, I will focus on a specific image in the...