L'Argent

Saccard owns a large bank and is about to go under. To save himself he builds a plan: he will finance an aviator's flight to Guyana, the flight will make headlines around the world, and his stock will jump. The aviator, Jacques Hamelin, flies. Meanwhile Saccard goes after Hamelin's wife Line. When the plane comes down, or is thought to have come down, the exchange loses its mind and everyone tramples everyone else. Money in this film is not a subject but a place: everything happens on the floor of the Bourse. Marcel L'Herbier directs; two hours and forty-five minutes, silent, adapted from Émile Zola's novel with the story moved to the twenties. The exchange scenes were shot inside the Paris Bourse over three days with fifteen hundred extras and more than a dozen cameramen, with cameras hung on pulleys and lowered from above.