rise and fall
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur
Bernède (screenplay, based on the novel by Émile Zola), Marcel L'Herbier
(director) L'Argent / 1928,
premiered 1929
Hamelin, having heard of Saccard's vicious banking methods, is not at
all sure that he wants to join forces with the banker; but his young, very
naive wife, Line (Mary Glory) is awed by the money and social associations that
might be provided by her husband's rise and convinces him to sign-on as
vice-president of Saccard's board. He does so, however, only on the condition that
he be the one to fly solo to Guyane and set up the refineries there—all to the
great distress of Line, worried for husband's life and for the long period of
isolation.


Similarly, Line's night-time view from Saccard's office of the Place de
l'Opéra where hundreds of individuals have gathered under the lights to hear of
the progress of Hamelin's transatlantic flight, enwraps her in a world of a
delirious confusion, ending with Saccard's first unsuccessful sexual attack,
creating an equally dizzying sensation which might be said to define Line's
frail condition at nearly all times in this film.
Another scene, the grand party Saccard gives in honor Line, which
includes a special moat-like construction for the orchestra replete with a
bridge across which jazz dancers kick their legs high (two of the large female
dancers looking suspiciously like males in drag) is awe-inspiring, as we
gradually realize this frenetic action is set contrapuntally against a
desperate Line hiding out in a side room, separated by a futuristic row of
hanging plastic tubes, ready to shoot
her host. Strangely, the self-protecting La baronne prevents Line from
accomplishing the act, while saving also her enemy's life.
Certainly some of these masterfully created and always grand
cinematically beautiful shots are overkill, given the relative simplicity of
the good and bad scenarios they embrace. There are moments, one must admit,
when one feels he is witnessing the story of "Sweet Nell and the evil
villain" being played in a palace setting. Many of the critics of the
original showing argued against what they found as scant justification for the
indulgent sets and camerawork. But
ultimately, if the cinema conquers the tale, who cares?: it is a momentous
thing to behold.
In the tale itself, Saccard goes to jail, and the young hero, now going
blind, returns home only to be arrested for being involved with Saccard's
swindle. There is something joyously loony about a blind navigator (blind not
only physically but spiritually) and his utterly innocent wife having been so
swept up into this international spectacle. They are both so simple and
unpretentious (Hamelin is handsome but his face is badly scared and Line is, as I
have suggested, always about to faint) that it is nearly unimaginable that they
could even have come to know a Saccard, let alone be saved by Gundermann.
As for Saccard—always the evil villain, but also strangely portrayed, at
times, as a kind of sad-sack comedian who can find no joy in his lusts—at
film's end he has discovered a new victim, the jailer who locks him up!
Accordingly, the film closes less as a didactic moral statement
(although there is certainly that in the plot) than as a kind of comic
revelation that such a grand world often leads nowhere. But there is always a
difference, as L'Herbier perceives, between life and art. And perhaps the art
needs to be grand where life does not. That this film, updated from Zola's day
to the French market of the time, should have been made just years before the
international monetary collapse of the early 1930s, is all the more amazing,
and revelatory of L'Herbier's somewhat clairvoyant perspective. Certainly his
art would influence film for years to come.
The same year this movie premiered, the first talkie The Jazz Singer was shown in France,
and, despite L'Herbier's innovative sound experiments (the recorded putters and
sputters of the plane, the mumbles of the crown scenes) embedded into L'Argent, within just a few months the
kind of impressionist cinema he had helped to create, in which the visual
dominated the realism of dialogue-oriented book-bound scripts, L'Herbier's
experiments suddenly seemed outdated. And, although the director continued over
the next several years to attempt to produce experimental cinema, he ultimately
gave up those attempts, himself becoming seduced, perhaps, by script-based
film-making. Coherence and realist narrative came to dominate over the theatrical
and performative "rises and falls" of his kind of cinematic art.
Los
Angeles, July 12, 2012
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