convincing revelation and interpretation of life's realities." A review in Exceptional Photoplays stated that "Mr. von Stroheim has always been the realist as Rex Ingram is the romanticist and Griffith the sentimentalist of the screen, and in Greed he has given us an example of realism at its starkest. Like the novel from which the plot was taken, Greed is a terrible and wonderful thing." Box office Greed was a financial disappointment. On its initial run, it earned $224,500 in the United States, $3,063 in Canada and $47,264 in other markets. In total it earned $274,827. Von Stroheim's biographer Arthur Lennig stated that according to MGM's records the final cost of Greed was $546,883. Another biographer, Richard Koszarski, stated that its final cost was $665,603: $585,250 for the production, $30,000 for von Stroheim's personal fee, $54,971 for processing and editing, $53,654 for advertising and $1,726 for Motion Picture dues. Arthur Lennig asserted that MGM's official budget for Greed was suspiciously high for a film with no stars, no built sets, a small crew and inexpensive film stock. Lennig suspects that MGM averaged the film's cost with the more expensive The Merry Widow in order to prevent von Stroheim from getting a percentage of the more profitable film. The Merry Widow ended up being a hit and earned more profits than Greed had lost; it cost $614,961 but earned $996,226 on its initial run. Legacy In his final years, von Stroheim said that "of all my films, only Greed was a fully realized work; only Greed had a total validity." In 1926 a British foundation of arts and sciences requested a copy of the original version of Greed to keep in their archive, but their request was denied by MGM. Henri Langlois screened the studio version of Greed for von Stroheim in 1950. Von Stroheim said, "It was for me an exhumation. It was like opening a coffin in which there was just dust, giving off a terrible stench, a couple of vertebra and a piece of shoulder bone." He went on to say that "It was as if a man's beloved was run over by a truck, maimed beyond recognition. He goes to see her in the morgue. Of course, he still loves her but it's only the memory of her that he can love—because he doesn't recognize her anymore." In the early 1950s Greeds reputation began to grow and