This film shouldn't be confused with McTeague which was also known as Life's a Whirlpool, an early telling of Frank Norris's McTeague, later filmed by Eric von Stroheim as Greed (1923).
McTeague is a dentist of limited intellect from a poor miner's family, who has opened a dentist shop on Polk Street in San Francisco.
McTeague | Dan McTeague | McTeague (opera) | McTeague (film) |
Following his 1899 success McTeague, Norris formulated his idea for a trilogy of novels on the topic of wheat, his Epic of the Wheat, from its growth in California in The Octopus, to its distribution via Chicago in his posthumously published 1903 work The Pit, to its consumption in a famished region of Europe or Asia in The Wolf.
He has composed three major operas, McTeague, A View From the Bridge, and A Wedding, all commissioned and premiered by the Lyric Opera of Chicago conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.