Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "L'Argent" (1928)

I gen­er­ally lim­it my foreign-region DVD recom­mend­a­tions to titles that can be appre­ci­ated by English-speaking peoples, that is, which carry English-language sub­titles or have English lan­guage soundtracks. I don’t doubt that at some time in the future an enter­pris­ing DVD label will issue a ver­sion of Marcel L’Herbier’s monu­ment­al, legendary 1928 L’Argent with English-language inter­titles. For now, though, this nearly-170-minute res­tor­a­tion exists—only just recently!—on disc in a (very spiffy double-DVD) French-only edi­tion. As it hap­pens, the film’s nar­rat­ive is suf­fi­ciently plain—one might even say primal—that one need only pos­sess, shall we say, Small French in order to “get” it.

The movie seems to exist to prove the pro­pos­i­tion that a tale of inter­na­tion­al fin­an­cial intrigue can pack as much trans­port­ive visu­al power as any peri­od epic, or adven­ture saga or, well, any­thing at all. Loosely adap­ted from a Zola nov­el but updated to the peri­od in which it was shot, L’Herbier’s film is the story of two rival fin­an­ci­ers: the cor­pu­lent, stubby-fingered, vul­gar, unend­ingly needy and greedy Saccard (Pierre Alcover, who later shone in Clair’s Le Million and Carne’s Drole de Drame) and the lean, chilly, chess-master-like Gunderman (Albert Abel, the mas­ter of the city in Lang’s Metropolis). (The above screen cap, incid­ent­ally, shows the round room that serves as Gunderman’s recep­tion hall, dec­or­ated with a world map delin­eat­ing Gunderman’s hold­ings, More on that presently.) Saccard hatches a scheme involving famed avi­at­or Hamelin (Henry Victor), dis­patch­ing him on a publicity-garnering record flight to French Guyana, where Saccard’s Universal Bank will start pro­spect­ing for oil. As the same time, Saccard lusts after Hamelin’s pure-hearted wife Line (Mary Glory). As Saccard brusquely and bluffly pur­sues his schemes, Gunderman manip­u­lates against him with sin­is­ter calm—and with no little help from Saccard’s former mis­tress, the icily glam Baroness Sandorf (Brigitte Helm, Metropolis’ immor­tal Maria.) 

Come on, vogue: Helm in L’Argent.

A favor­ite tac­tic of L’Herbier in L’Argent is to pump up a giv­en sequence’s emo­tion­al power by deli­ri­ously inter­cut­ting between its vari­ous com­pon­ents, cli­max­ing in a cre­ated real­ity that has noth­ing to do with the spa­tial real­ity of these com­pon­ents. That’s a fancy way of put­ting things, so let me lay it out. The cli­max of the first half of the film is the take-off of Hamelin’s plane, bound on a record-breaking flight to French Guyana. Component one is the actu­al take-off of the plane itself, begin­ning at its igni­tion, as a line of men work to get the pro­peller spin­ning. Component two is the agony of Hamelin’s wife, Line, who doesn’t want him to go on the trip and who oper­at­ic­ally ful­min­ates the whole time, to the point that Hamelin comes in to the house to com­fort her even as he’s sup­posed to be board­ing the plane. Component three is the increas­ing activ­ity on the floor of the Paris Bourse (stock exchange) as shares of the Sassard’s Universal Bank trade in a frenzy. The fam­ous over­head shots of the Bourse make it look like a giant wheel, with a swarm of ants attack­ing it. You could mis­take it at first for one of the wheels of the air­plane, or the cen­ter of its not yet spin­ning pro­peller. Line’s prot­est­a­tions grow more oper­at­ic, Hamelin boards the plane, and the plane takes off; and this is capped by a point-of-view shot that sug­gests the plane is soar­ing above the floor of the Bourse. Which of course it is not. But L’Herbier’s con­fla­tion of these two spaces makes a kind of deli­ri­ous sense. 
The Bourse wheel.

For this view­er, the visu­al apo­theosis of the film is a series of two shots near the end of the first part, as Hamelin’s tri­umph is announced to Paris. Saccard enters the super-swank apart­ment he’s bought for Line (there’s some won­der­ful busi­ness earli­er in the pic­ture with Line self-consciously straight­en­ing the deteri­or­at­ing car­pet of the couple’s thread­bare flat when Saccard first vis­its), a pred­at­or look­ing for a celebration…

…and there’s the exult­ant Line at the balcony…

…the two shots have such incred­ible scale and ima­gin­at­ive design as to take the breath away. And yet the film is any­thing but sterile or over­de­termined. L’Herbier used hand-held cam­er­as, well, well before movie cam­er­as were meant to be hand-held; the move­ment fre­quently plays hav­oc with the focus of a giv­en shot. The act­ing, too, is alive, elec­tric, par­tic­u­larly Alcover’s. He con­veys Saccard’s unslak­able desires with pin­point pre­ci­sion and even­tu­al poignancy. He’s par­tic­u­larly bril­liant in a scene in which he toggles between avar­i­cious interest in Hamelin’s busi­ness pro­pos­al and almost boy­ish attrac­tion to Line.

The pic­ture also offers a little taste of Busby Berkeley avant le lettre…

…in a party/confrontation scene in the film’s second half. And then there’s Gunderman’s cir­cu­lar wall again…

…this detail from it reminds me of the refrain of that great Art Bears tune, “The Song of Investment Capital Overseas”:

Road and rails
Run like tracks
And carry me upon their backs.

And yes, it is iron­ic that such extra­vag­ance was expen­ded on what was, finally, a con­dem­na­tion of cap­it­al. And so what.

This is, I know, a pretty scat­ter­shot treat­ment of the film. To those who find it too scat­ter­shot, sorry. But if you’re inspired to check it out, and you do check it out, I think you’ll agree with me that it’s such a multi-variegated and strangely inspired work that a scat­ter­shot reac­tion is, ini­tially at least, only nat­ur­al. Now I need to take some remedi­al French so’s I can tackle the extras…