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For von Stroheim, a martinet who affected the dress, bearing and monocle of a Prussian officer, their opposition was like a curse that followed him. At Universal, where Thalberg was then employed, von Stroheim's "Foolish Wives" (1922) was cut by a third, and Thalberg fired him from his next film, "Merry-Go-Round." He fled to MGM to make "Greed," which cost $750,000 and took a year to shoot, only to have Thalberg catch up with him there and demand more cuts.

No one now alive has seen the original version, but a San Francisco drama critic named Idwal Jones was present at its first studio screening, which began at 10 a.m. and continued without breaks for lunch or anything else, von Stroheim sitting ramrod straight through the whole thing as an example to the others. Jones was a friend of the director's, but his account of that experience does not inspire our envy. He liked the individual parts well enough; it was just that there were so many of them: "Every episode is developed to the full, every comma of the book put in, as it were." He noted that von Stroheim "worships realism like an abstract ideal; worships it more, and suffers more in its achievement, than other men do for wealth or fame."

Indeed the film is realistic. Opening scenes were shot in the very gold mine that Norris wrote about; it was reopened for the movie. The San Francisco dentist's office was not a set but a real second-floor office, which still exists. Von Stroheim could have shot his desert scenes outside Palm Springs, but insisted on shooting in the 120-degree heat of Death Valley itself; the camera had to be cooled with iced towels. Some of his crew mutinied and others complained. Von Stroheim slept with his pistol, and as his two actors engaged in their death struggle he screamed: "Fight! Fight! Try to hate each other as you hate me!"

These memories and others are recalled in a book about von Stroheim by Thomas Quinn Curtis, a longtime friend of the director's, who until fairly recent years was the Paris Herald-Tribune's film critic. He recalls lunching one day in Paris with Louis B. Mayer, who told him the story of his fight with von Stroheim. That evening, Curtis had dinner with the director, who said, "That's entirely accurate." Their fight began when von Stroheim took up his gloves to stalk out of the mogul's office. "I suppose you consider me rabble," Mayer said. "Not even that," said von Stroheim. Mayer struck him so hard that von Stroheim fell out through the office door and onto the floor, still clutching gloves and cane. "You see, my hands were occupied," he told Mayer's secretary.

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