L'Argent

Marcel L'Herbier's monumental final silent film — a sprawling, visually dazzling adaptation of Émile Zola's novel about financial speculation, corruption, and the human wreckage left in the wake of unchecked greed. A charismatic banker builds a financial empire on fraud and manipulation, destroying lives on his way up and on his way down. L'Herbier stages the stock exchange sequences with a kinetic energy that makes the trading floor look like a battlefield, and the Art Deco production design is staggering in its scale and beauty. The film's parallels to modern financial crises are uncanny — Zola's nineteenth-century story of market manipulation and moral bankruptcy could have been ripped from twenty-first-century headlines. A grand, ambitious work that serves as a fitting capstone to the French silent cinema's extraordinary decade.