This film features one of the earliest uses of a hidden camera in film-making. When Trina (Zasu Pitts) leaves the junk shop after discovering the dead body, she rushes into a real street and into real passers-by who were unaware they were being filmed. A crowd gathered, police turned up to the scene and it is said that a reporter called in the 'murder' to his editor. This coincides with Dziga Vertov's Kino Eye (1924) which also used hidden camera techniques for the first time.
MGM's first feature-length movie.
While filming the final confrontation in the desert, Erich von Stroheim allegedly shouted several times at actors Gibson Gowland and Jean Hersholt "Hate each other! Hate each other as much as you hate me!"
Not only did the studio order the director to cut the movie back from his intended 4.5 hours to around two hours, they also burned the unused film reels in order to extract the expensive silver nitrate from it for recycling. Although an extended version of the movie (239 minutes long) was created in 1999 by using still photographs in the place of scenes that were cut, a complete version was simply not possible because most of the original film is now considered lost.
While doing research for the Erich von Stroheim documentary The Man You Loved to Hate (1979), filmmaker Kim Eveleth discovered a previously unknown cache of stills from the cut scenes of this film, thus paving the way for the eventual restoration of the director's masterpiece.
Erich von Stroheim: as a balloon vendor (although only in a deleted sequence). McTeague and Trina buy balloons from the vendor on the street.
Erich von Stroheim: [prostitutes] In a scene that was part of Stroheim's original cut, McTeague's father is shown carousing with prostitutes.