L'Argent

L'Argent (1928)

Adapted from the novel L'Argent by Émile Zola, the film portrays the world of banking and the stock market in Paris in the 1920s.

Date of release
1928-12-25
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (45)
Runtime
2h 45m
Genres
Drama
Director
Marcel L'Herbier

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: L'Argent

L'Argent ("money") is a French silent film directed in 1928 by Marcel L'Herbier. The film was adapted from the 1891 novel L'Argent by Émile Zola, and it portrays the world of banking and the stock market in Paris in the 1920s.

Production

L'Herbier's decision to update Zola's story to the present-day met with strong criticism even before filming began. The theatre and film director André Antoine published a newspaper article denouncing such a betrayal of Zola's depiction of society in the Second Empire and arguing that it was unacceptable to treat a classic work of literature in this way.

Filming began in spring 1928 and continued until the autumn. At the Joinville Studios, art directors André Barsacq and Lazare Meerson constructed several monumental sets for key scenes: the grand interiors of the respective banks of Saccard and Gunderman, the Hamelins' apartment with its view over the skyline of Paris, the baroness Sandorf's mansion with its split-level gaming room, and for Saccard's party the massive room in his house with one w…

For his principal cameraman L'Herbier chose Jules Kruger who had devised the elaborate camerawork of Gance's Napoléon. Within the huge spaces of the sets they employed unusually active movements for the camera whose virtuosity makes them highly visible to the spectator. At Saccard's party the camera glides back and forth above the guests; in the bank scenes it moves alongside and among the crowds.

Another innovation that L'Herbier employed for the first screening of the film was the use of recorded sound effects. For the scenes of Hamelin's take-off at the airfield, which is intercut with scenes of frantic activity at the Bourse, authentic recordings were made in both settings and then a composite blend of them was played back from records in the cinema.

L'Herbier's original cut of the film, which was shown to the press in December 1928, ran for about 200 minutes. During the latter stages of production, his relationship with Jean Sapène, his co-producer, had virtually broken down, and to his dismay he found that at the first public showing in Paris in January 1929, the film had been re-edited in places on Sapène's instructions and was now more than 30 minutes shorter.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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