Claude Garry's debts have mounted up, and they're starting to threaten him with bailiffs. His wife, Stacia Napierkowska, goes to see her father the banker, who had forbidden the marriage. On seeing the gambling debts he declares he will not help them out. So Garry kills him. A year later, having taken over the bank, he sends out fliers offering 25% on deposits, and offering crop insurance to farmers. For a while, all is well, and he throws fabulous parties. The financial press turns against him, the shares collapse, and a mob invades the bank.
There were Ponzi schemes before Charles Ponzi. While the most famous was 520% Miller in Brooklyn, who offered 10% a week, the earliest seems to have been in the 1860s, but there were examples in Vienna and Munich. This early Pathe feature, directed by René Leprince and Ferdinand Zecca, shows the life cycle of such a scheme, with Garry's complete moral bankruptcy indicated early on.
It's interesting that this is clearly a movie intended to appeal to the middle classes; French movies had long settled on the realization that their audience was the lower classes. However, the production costs with a longer movie called for a broadening of the audience, and this is clearly a step in that direction, to go with the new, larger, and more luxurious movie theaters that were beginning to be built.
