L'Argent (1928)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

The curse of capital

Money was the bane of Marcel L'Herbier's life.  'The dung on which life thrives' (to quote Émile Zola) was the very thing that crushed Herbier's initial grandiose aspirations for film art and drew him slowly but surely away from the slippery mud-track of an avant-garde poet to the safe, rigidly defined freeway that was commercial cinema.  Herbier was not alone in suffering this fate.  His equally talented contemporaries Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and René Clair all went the same way to a greater or lesser extent, although their reputations were not so badly harmed by the concessions they were forced to make as their careers fell into decline.  Clair was still considered an important innovator during the transition to sound cinema, Epstein redeemed himself with his lyrical Breton studies and Gance never let the world forget he had made possibly the greatest film of all - Napoléon.  By the time sound arrived L'Herbier was pretty much a spent force, his artistic prowess burned up in less than a decade in which he achieved little commercial success.

In a world in which Marcel L'Herbier had access to limitless resources he would have flourished like no other filmmaker, but in the real world where money decides everything he was doomed to be corralled into the crushing mediocrity of mainstream convention.  The accomplished artiste innovateur who turned filmmaking into a wondrously dynamic fine art in the early 1920s with such stunning impressionistic masterworks as El Dorado (1921) and L'Inhumaine (1924) became little more than a journeyman hack by the mid-1930s.  Only the merest handful of the sound films he made over a 23 year period (La Route impériale, Les Hommes nouveaux, Nuits de feu, La Nuit fantastique, La Vie de bohème) show anything more than a faint glimmering of true artistic merit.  The rest are almost totally forgettable and have - rightly - been forgotten, with the result that L'Herbier is now widely considered to be an exclusively silent filmmaker.  And all this was down to money, or rather, the extreme lack of it.  The constantly impecunious L'Herbier detested money more than anything in the world, and it was his abject, unremitting hatred of filthy lucre (helped by his left-leaning politics) that compelled him to make what is unquestionably his greatest film - L'Argent, cinema's most deliriously virulent assault on the world of high finance.

Marcel L'Herbier's decision to attempt a screen adaptation of a major work of French literature - Émile Zola's L'Argent (book 18 in the famous Rougon-Macquart saga) - was in itself a massive compromise, not something the director would have bothered with had he been financially independent.  Adapting a novel was a concession to popular tastes that was entirely contrary to his original conception of cinema.  The craze for adaptations of literary works began in 1908 with an attempt by Pathé and Film d'Art to bring bourgeois respectability to the new medium of cinema.  A decade later, in the face of a fierce onslaught from the burgeoning American film industry, adaptations of well-known plays and novels came to dominate French cinema, to the extent that variety and innovation withered, thus further diminishing France's place in the industry.  What happened next was an almost exact parallel to what would happen thirty years later with the advent of the French New Wave.

A new wave of realism

In the early 1920s, a loose collection of cinema critics, film theorists, screenwriters and rookie filmmakers united in their distress over French cinema's rapidly shrinking scope and importance. They began advocating an alternative that was based on original scenarios and a dramatic break from the predominantly action-oriented, objective approach to film narrative that had become the inviolable norm.  This first wave of Avant-Garde rebels comprised some illustrious names - Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and René Clair - all of whom were committed to exploring and extending the subjective potential in cinematic expression.

Termed 'the French impressionists' (as their ideas were seen to be complementary to those of the German expressionists), their experiments with lighting, camera effects, subjective photography and editing techniques were motivated by a desire to move from the outer world of events and actions to the inner world of thought and feelings.  Impressionistic cinema is a daring attempt to capture on celluloid the constantly fluctuating psychological states of its protagonists, allowing for a much greater degree of emotional connection between the audience and the characters on the screen and thereby achieving a heightened sense of reality.  Going beyond the artifice of the well-greased narrative and placing greater emphasis on the perceptual experience of individuals - these were deemed essential for an art form that was intended to represent the human condition as authentically and deeply as possible.

Marcel L'Herbier's interest in pushing the envelope of film expression began early in the 1910s when he was in his early twenties.  Gripped by a fascination for symbolist and post-symbolist literature, he began writing plays and poems whilst trying his hand at literary criticism.  Innovation was in his blood so it was inevitable that, having received formal training as a filmmaker in the cinematographic section of the French army during WWI, he soon became one of the driving forces of the Parisian Avant-Garde.  It was L'Herbier's striving for complete artistic freedom on his films that compelled him to turn his back on Gaumont (the company that allowed him to make his first great film El Dorado) and led him to form his own film production company, Cinégraphic.

Almost immediately, L'Herbier found himself hamstrung by the commercial realities of filmmaking.  Such was the failure of his first completed independent film L'Inhumaine (1924) that he had no choice but to move on to the much safer ground of play or book adaptations, progressively ditching his high-minded auteur principles merely to ensure his survival in an increasingly precarious business.  The progression from Feu Mathias Pascal (1926) (an impressionistic tour de force) to Le Diable au Coeur (a comparatively mundane crowd-pleaser) is one of grudging acquiescence to mainstream conformity.  The breadth of artistic originality, the bold impressionisic tropes that had set L'Herbier apart in his early career - all of this was in marked decline by the time the director embarked on his most ambitious film, L'Argent.

A marriage made in Hell

Awed by Abel Gance's historical epic Napoléon (1927), the now 40-year-old Marcel L'Herbier was resolved to making a comparable cinematic monument, but he knew that such a project was way beyond the limited resources of his own virtually insolvent company.  His only option was a co-production with a much larger company, Jean Sapène's Société des Cinéromans, which had had much greater success with its big budget adaptations.  Sapène had recently produced Henri Fescourt's incredibly ambitious Les Misérables (1925) and seemed to be the ideal backer - until he insisted on a clause in the contract allowing him the right to intervene in just about every area of production.  L'Herbier knew at once that this meant sacrificing the thing that was dearest to him - total artistic freedom during the making of the film - but he had no alternative but to agree to Sapène's stringent terms.

It wasn't long before the two men came into fierce conflict, with heated memos flying between them like poisoned darts on a daily basis.  A former press baron, Sapène had a reputation as a tyrant and was used to getting his way.  He insisted on seeing every shooting schedule and took full advantage of his right to oversee and approve every area of production.  L'Herbier had to endure constant verbal and physical abuse and, at one point, tensions rose so high that Sapène punched the director in the face, almost rendering him unconscious.  It soon became apparent to L'Herbier that what he had entered into was a Faustian pact with the kind of capitalistic devil he reviled most.

It is no accident that the director's fraught relationship with Sapène is exactly mirrored by that of the central antagonists in L'Argent, Hamelin and Saccard.  L'Herbier clearly identifies himself with the exploited mild-mannered aviator who is forced, through financial necessity, to accept the backing of the most despicable breed of businessman, a money-grubbing vulgarian who is Jean Sapène in all but name.   Just as the heroic airman is compelled to sacrifice his self-respect (and possibly his marriage) through his unholy alliance with a capitalistic Mephistopheles, so L'Herbier had no option but to give up a fair chunk of his artistic integrity so that he could fulfil his burning ambition to make his one great film.  The making of L'Argent was just one more retelling of the famous Faust legend, perhaps a tad nastier than the original.

By the time production on the film was over, L'Herbier and Sapène hated each other so much that they were no longer on speaking terms.  Sapène's blazing contempt for the director was such that, between the film's Paris première in December 1928 and its first public screening in April 1929, he imposed a drastic series of cuts that reduced its length by 30 minutes, without informing L'Herbier.  There then ensued a public battle between the two men, the director insisting that the edits be reversed, the producer adamantly refusing to make even the tiniest concession.  It wasn't until four decades had passed that L'Herbier was able to reinstate the excised sequences and allow the public to see L'Argent in the form he had intended.

Another matter which the director had absolutely no control over was the casting of two leading German actors - Brigitte Helm and Alfred Abel (both major stars thanks to the success of Fritz Lang's Metropolis) - for two of the principal roles; this was forced on him by the film's German distributor UFA.  The casting of Helm and Abel made commercial sense but it had the unfortunate consequence of lending L'Argent an overtly nationalistic, anti-German subtext, since it is their venal characters that ultimately triumph in the film, at the expense of the more sympathetically drawn characters played by French actors (Pierre Alcover and Mary Glory).

L'Herbier's last hurrah

Critical reaction to L'Argent on its first release was overall fairly damning.  A minority of reviewers professed to being greatly impressed by certain aspects of the production, with a considerable praise being lavished on the unusually sophisticated camerawork and artistic design,  However, many more critics disliked the film intensely, considering it overblown and pretentious, and it was widely lambasted for not being faithful to Zola's original text.  The classic 1891 novel was set at the time of the Second Empire, drawing on two of the most notorious crises of the 19th century - the Paris stock market crash of 1882 and the Panama Canal scandal of 1892.  L'Herbier's film timeshifts the story to a contemporary setting, implying that the speculative lunacy of the 1800s was still very much alive in the 1920s.  (In this the film proved to be remarkably prescient, anticipating not only the Wall Street Crash of 1929 but also the 1934 Stavisky Affair, a financial scandal of such enormity that it brought down the French government, leading to a long period of political instability in France).  One of the film's most vociferous critics was the retired, highly respected film director André Antoine who deeply resented the updating of Zola's masterpiece - even though he had taken comparable (arguably greater) liberties with his own literary adaptations, especially La Terre (1920) and L'Arlésienne (1922).

L'Argent was one of the most insanely ambitious film productions of its time.  It took several months to shoot, consumed 100,000 metres of film and cost five million francs to make (a more than fifty per cent overspend on its original three-million franc budget!).  It was folly on an almost unprecedented scale and the chances of the film breaking even were remote in the extreme.  The mixed critical reaction to the film resulted in mediocre box office receipts in France, although it had some success in Germany, no doubt on the back of the immense popularity of Abel and Helm.  It did not help that the film's release coincided with the first screenings in Europe of the first film ever to use synchronised sound, The Jazz Singer (1927) - an event of seismic importance for cinema.  L'Argent may have been one of the artistic peaks of the silent era but it came out just as the public was losing interest in silent films.  Its failure at the box office was to deliver a decisive death blow to L'Herbier's dreams of a career of artistic independence.  With the immediate demise of his company Cinégraphic, he was reduced to being little more than just another director for hire for the rest of his career.  His days as a trailblazing cineaste and cinematic revolutionary were well and truly over.

Although Marcel L'Herbier went on to direct one more silent film and 30 sound films (as well as undertaking some important pioneering work for French television in the 1950s) his best work was already behind him.   He freely admitted that L'Argent was his last work of any significance, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the film came to enjoy its present status as one of the towering achievements of French silent cinema, following a critical reappraisal by such influential film commentators as Noël Burch.  'A masterpiece of modernist cinema' is how L'Argent came to be regarded, garnering particular attention for its incredibly exuberant use of camera movement, which sets it apart from most films of its period.

L'Herbier's Ariel

As is revealed in Jean Dréville's fascinating must-see documentary Autour de l'argent (1929) (made with the director's full support whilst L'Argent was being shot), L'Herbier went to extraordinary lengths to use camera motion as a means of capturing the wild dynamism and chaotic fervour of the world of high finance.  In this he was assisted by the legendary cinematographer Jules Kruger, who had previously collaborated with Abel Gance on Napoléon and would subsequently contribute to some of the most visually striking French films of the 1930s - including Raymond Bernard's Les Misérables  (1934) and Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937).  Long and elaborate tracking shots were achieved with cameramen strapped to trolleys or placed on floating platforms that were moved about on wires on pulleys fixed to the studio ceiling.  Gliding through space like an unencumbered spirit, the camera lens becomes L'Herbier's Ariel, his all-seeing eye, roving wherever it chooses through an opulent landscape of greed-driven delirium.

For the film's most dazzling and surreal shot, an automatic (self-winding) camera is sent plummeting from the ceiling down to the ring at the very heart of the bustling Paris stock exchange.  Numerous are the scenes in which a shoulder-mounted or hand-held camera ploughs through jam-packed crowds of extras.  There are zooms inwards and outwards and pans of breathtaking versatility across spaces of jaw-dropping proportions, cameras arranged in just about every conceivable position, and dissolves and fades used with sublime artistry.  The effect of all this cinematographic bravado, achieved with an almost effortless grace, is both powerfully hypnotic and intensely awe-inspiring.

Another noteworthy feature of L'Argent is its imaginative use of intellectual (or metaphorical) montage, which was no doubt inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's application of the same editing technique on his early films Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925).  In an early scene, portrait shots of Saccard in his office are inter-cut with a shot of a statuette depicting Napoleon on a horse, leaving us in no doubt as to the enormity of the banker's inflated ego.  More startling is the sequence in which Hamelin's plane departs for its long transatlantic voyage.  (For the film's première in December 1928, these images would have had an even greater impact as they were accompanied by recordings of the sound of an aeroplane taking off and the tumult of everyday activity within the Paris Bourse.)

The plane's take-off is inter-cut several times with a bird's-eye view of the Paris Stock Exchange, with the frenzied mass of traders seen from high up in the cupola.  Such is the intensity of the speculative furore that you feel that the plane is being prevented from lifting off by human will alone.  The tension slowly builds as the camera moves slowly downwards in a descending arc across the crowded floor of the Bourse, matching the forward movement of the plane as it suddenly breaks free of its invisible moorings and surges into the sky.  In this one remarkable sequence L'Herbier serves up what is possibly cinema's starkest representation of the eternal conflict that has guided human civilization for millennia - the struggle between man's aspiration to reach for the sky and his baser instincts to bring everything down into the gutter.

A world of boundless excess

L'Herbier's penchant for deep-space mise-en-scène - refined to perfection in his earlier L'Inhumaine - is boosted to vertiginous heights by his bold and imaginative use of camera movement within the enormous, highly geometrical sets.  The most visually stunning scenes are those set in the Paris Bourse - scenes that were actually filmed in the real location (within the handsome Palais Brongniart) with around 2000 extras over the three-day Whitsun holiday when the exchange was closed for business.  The frenzy of human activity within the Bourse offers a potent visual metaphor for the hysteria of the masses succumbing to a wildly overheated speculative bubble and is mirrored by similar shots of the crowds massing in the Place de l'Opéra, a heaving mass of humanity anxiously awaiting news of a record-breaking flight.  The latter nocturnal scenes posed a major logistical challenge, requiring a large number of spot lights to be erected on the rooftops of buildings around the busy square.

L'Argent's interior studio sets are no less spectacular in their design and scale, their enormity constantly emphasised by the use of wide-angle lenses, long tracking shots and low- and high-angled camera positions.  Designers André Barsacq and Lazare Meerson achieved wonders with their stylish, cavernous sets constructed at huge expense in the newly opened Francoeur Studios in Paris.  Most ambitious is the enormous space - the size of a Hollywood dance stage - allocated for the centrepiece party sequence of the film's second act.  This includes an indoor pool and raised platforms on which numerous dancers and musicians perform extravagant numbers (in the manner of a Busby Berkeley musical), surrounded by a swollen mass of partygoers heaving with vitality - the epitome of Roaring Twenties exuberance.

The bank sets are just as vast and vibrant, with endless ranks of secretaries typing away amid the hustle and bustle that is the loudly beating heart of the capitalist system.  Tucked away in this labyrinthine complex like an inner sanctum is the circular map room, which provides the film with its eeriest shot - a camera tracking around the perimeter of the room, the lens fixed on one of Gunderman's minions in such a way that he appears to remain stationary as he moves whilst the whole world revolves around him.  The living areas of Gunderman and Baronnes Sandorf are no less lavish in their size and furnishings, the stark and stylish Art Deco adornments underling these characters' superior social status and over-inflated self-importance.

It is with these elephantine interior spaces and the accompanying virtuoso camerawork that L'Herbier manages to develop his trademark deep-space mise-en-scène into a fine art, with a flamboyance and technical assuredness unmatched by any other cineaste before or since.  L'Herbier's achievement cannot be overstated.  L'Argent isn't merely a film masterpiece - it is the absolute pinnacle of impressionistic cinema.  For just under three hours, the spectator has no choice but to become totally immersed in the dizzying casino reality of the film's protagonists as they become caught up in a deranged speculative whirlwind set in motion by the money-obsessed banker Saccard - a man with an almost god-like power and the lowest morals imaginable.

The allure of the gambler

It wasn't long after Émile Zola created the character in his 1891 novel L'Argent that 'Saccard' found its way into the French language, becoming a byword for a corporate individual driven by an uncontrollable lust for money.  In L'Herbier's film, Saccard is the most laughably egregious specimen of nouveau riche speculator you can conceive, a man to be loathed and reviled, and yet there is something strangely heroic, almost admirable about him.  Pierre Alcover (a poor market porter who went on to become a highly regarded stage actor) was a controversial choice for the role but his casting proved to be totally inspired, possibly the greatest single thing about L'Argent.  Alcover's immense physical bulk and porcine features, combined with his plebeian mannerisms, make his character both a fitting symbol for capitalist greed and a wildcard outsider capable of sending the whole world into a turmoil through his risky actions.  Saccard may be the most loathsome individual in the story but he is also, paradoxically, the only one who really engages our interest and sympathies.

No other character in L'Argent has anything like the passion, drive and energy that Saccard evinces in just about every scene.  Whilst Saccard blazes with a manic intensity throughout, the rest of the dramatis personae (with the possible exception of a sensation-seeking journalist played by Jules Berry) are just limp, anaemic passengers in a juggernaut driven at full-speed down a perilous slalom by an over-energised madman drunk on his own ludicrous self-confidence.  The huge close-ups of Saccard's mean-looking piggy face serve to exaggerate not only his sheer naked monstrosity but also his deeply felt humanity.  This is a man who is addicted to living on the edge, a man who cannot exist without the thrill of jeopardy.  We are attracted to Saccard because we secretly envy him.  There is a lurid heroism to someone who makes a habit of living in a constant state of febrile anticipation, not knowing whether the next moment will bring untold wealth or abject ruin.  Saccard's incredible power over others derives not from his own capital (it hardly seems to matter whether he has money or not), but rather his extreme pro-risk mindset, which makes him appear both excitingly noble and deeply seductive.  He not only has remarkable powers of persuasion, able to gull thousands of investors with his wild speculative schemes, he also has an intense erotic charm that make him irresistible to the opposite sex - in spite of his unprepossessing appearance and boorish behaviour.  Nicolas Saccard is a force of nature and he knows it - the kind of unprincipled snake oil merchant on which raw capitalism depends in its unending war against social justice.

Alfred Abel's rival banker Gundermann would seem to represent the 'respectable' side of the banking fraternity - the kind that spurns frivolous speculation and values cold logic over gut feeling.  Yet, far from being an admirable figure, the restrained, starched-collared Gundermann comes across as even more contemptible than the risk-obsessed Saccard.  With his aristocratic pomposity and underhand chicanery he presents an even uglier face of capitalism, one that represents the interests of the haute bourgeoisie for whom Saccard is immensely valuable, distracting the public gaze away from the far less visible, but far more substantial wealth accumulation of the upper classes.

Gundermann's mistress - the icily seductive Baroness Sandorf (Brigitte Helm at her most provocatively sensual) - straddles the two extremes represented by the opposing bankers.  With her cool detachment she plays the part of the bourgeois aristocrat admirably but she is just as reckless a gambler as Saccard.  She even has a full-size gambling den in her own home - with a semi-opaque ceiling in the room beneath so that she can see the shadows of gamblers at play above her, stimulating her as she indulges in her earthier leisure activities.  As she moves around her Art Deco environs in her tight-fitting, low-cut lamé gowns, shoulders hunched, her gaze alert, Sandorf resembles a wild panther hungrily stalking its prey.  It is her private feud with Saccard that brings about his catastrophic downfall, and in the one erotically charged scene where they come into closest physical contact it isn't entirely clear who is seducing whom.  Sandorf and Saccard are two of a kind - instruments of chaos, their role being to keep spinning the cosmic roulette wheel that keeps the flow of money circulating in and out of people's pockets.

Vampire or victim?

With Sandorf's simmering sensuality so tentatively always within his grasp, it is hard to fathom why Saccard is strongly drawn to Line (Mary Glory), the fairly prosaic wife of the even less interesting aviator he has gone into business with.  Yet the banker's hankering after such tepid low-grade femininity is more than evident in his lustful features as his eyes fix on her stockinged legs, his fleshy lips salivating at the prospect of yet another speculative venture, on the chaise-longue.  In the scene where Line is gazing out of a window into the night sky Saccard creepily resembles Bela Lugosi's Dracula as he slowly sidles up to her, his intent more than evident from the flagrantly libidinous look in his eyes.  This is a mild precursor to the subsequent rencontre in which, finally giving into his bestial urges, Saccard attempts to rape his victim.  For this assault the perspective dramatically shifts from the banker to his victim and the full extent of her terror is palpably rendered through a frenzied montage of close-ups shot with a shaky hand-held camera.

As shocking as this is, as the scene develops, with the banker abruptly shamed by his impetuous actions, it is him that we pity.  By so readily accepting the easy wealth that has been offered her  - wealth that she has long coveted - Line appears more blameworthy than her aggressor.  How closely she resembles the materialistic socialite Edith Hardy in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), the film that first inspired L'Herbier to become a filmmaker (and which he would remake as Forfaiture in 1937).  Saccard, by contrast, strikes us as a man who is not responsible for his actions.  His impulsivity, recklessness and selfish impulses are all beyond his control.  He is no more worthy of censure than La Bête humaine's Jacques Lantier, a man prone to uncontrollable homicidal urges.  By the end of his film, L'Herbier compels us to regard Saccard not as a contemptible symbol of the capitalist system, but rather a mere malfunctioning cog in a satanic machine that exists to serve the interests of a privileged minority, whilst bringing turmoil and misery into the lives of countless others.

No happy ending

L'Argent may conclude with a humorous twist but its underlying message - that through money humanity has allowed itself to become the slave of capital - is pretty grim.  'Money is a great servant but a bad master',  according to the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon.  Marcel L'Herbier leaves us wondering whether even the first part of this statement is true.  As his film ends, the notional good guys Hamelin and Line appear forever in hock to the all-powerful money men, the manipulative establishment banker Gunderman has increased his wealth substantially and the financial wrecking ball Saccard is poised to unleash his next get-rich-quick wheeze on the world with results that are all too predictable.  This is the cheering denouement audiences were left with as they walked out of the theatres after watching L'Argent in the spring of 1929, a time when the sky was blue, the sun was shining and the prospects for stock market investors had never looked rosier.  Black Tuesday was still six months away.

Film Synopsis

With the imminent collapse of Caledonian Eagle, a company in which he has a large stockholding, Nicolas Saccard realises that the future of his own company, the Banque Universelle, is suddenly in jeopardy.  It transpires that Caledonian's attempt to raise capital has been thwarted by the intervention of a rival banker, Alphonse Gunderman, in a flagrant attempt to ruin Saccard, whom he considers to be the worst example of nouveau riche speculator.  Saccard brazens out his financial woes by immediately announcing a massive programme of recapitalisation, a sure-fire way of regaining the confidence of the market.  It so happens that the famous aviator Jacques Hamelin is desperately in need of financial support to cover his mounting debts.  Saccard agrees to stump up the cash he requires in return for a potentially lucrative concession to a petrol-rich area of land in Guyana.  He keeps from Hamelin his primary motive for backing him - namely his libidinous interest in the aviator's young wife, Line.

As a publicity stunt, Saccard coerces Hamelin into undertaking a record-breaking 40 hour solo flight to the South American country.  Upon his arrival in Guyana, the aviator must oversee the construction of a new oil field over several months.  Aware of how risky this venture is Line tries frantically to persuade her husband to withdraw but fails.  Despite his contempt for money, Hamelin ignores his wife's protestations and prepares for the flight that will either make him or break him.   Banque Universelle's shares go through the roof when the public gets to hear about Saccard's latest adventurous scheme.  Even Gunderman cannot resist buying a huge quantity of shares in the bank, caught up in a whirlwind of speculative fever with countless other investors.  The news that Hamelin is about to reach Guyana in record time heightens the euphoria that has gripped the nation, but the mood changes suddenly when it is reported that the aviator has crashed into the sea before reaching his destination.

Saccard is the only one who knows that Hamelin has landed safely, and he uses this information to his advantage by buying up shares in his bank when the share price goes into free fall.  As soon as it is announced that the aviator is alive the shares in the bank surge to new heights and Saccard suddenly finds himself in possession of an immense fortune.  With Hamelin preoccupied with the oil field construction, the banker takes advantage of his improved circumstances to begin his seduction of Line by offering her everything that money can buy.  Tired of her former threadbare existence, the aviator's wife willingly accepts the goodies that Saccard offers her - a new apartment, expensive jewellery and a chequebook allowing her to buy whatever she wishes.  Line realises too late what she is expected to give in return and when the banker makes his move she pushes him away in disgust.  Consumed with lust and fury, Saccard tells the object of his desire that unless she submits he will refuse to cover Hamelin's debts.

Driven to desperate measures, Line intends to shoot the vile banker at an extravagant party he is hosting at his vast residence.  The attempt is thwarted but the unfortunate woman finds an unlikely ally in Saccard's former mistress, the rich socialite Baroness Sandof.  Even though she owes her wealth and status to Saccard, Sandof now prefers the company of his deadly rival, Gunderman.  Under the Baroness's conniving influence, Line files a lawsuit against Saccard for false accounting, with spectacular results.  As investor confidence once again hits rock bottom, Banque Universelle's shares go into a tailspin and Saccard is taken into police custody.  On his return to France, Hamelin is also arrested, but he is cleared of criminal charges by Gunderman, his first act after acquiring a controlling stake in Saccard's bank.  Ruined and discredited, Saccard is placed on trial and sent to prison for six months.  Is this the end of his career?  Far from it.  His mind already set on future success, the disgraced financier soon gains the confidence of his warder, inviting him to join him in a business matter that will make them both fabulously wealthy.