Le million

Rene Clair's groundbreaking musical. If you want to see where songs first drove a story this is the place. This is the story of a starving young artist who finds he's won the lottery just as his creditors come calling. Unfortunately his ticket is in his coat, which is in his girlfriends apartment and has been given to an on the run convict who then... oh but that would be telling.

This is a light and frothy story where much of the dialog is sung (most people think this didn't happen until Oklahoma or Andrew Lloyd Webber). Its the sort of movie that they don't make any more, and rarely did when they did. Its sound a film from the early days that plays like a movie from five or six years later. Clair moves his camera around in ways that not even Busby Berkeley was doing (though to be honest comparing the two film makers is unfair since Berkeley was doing essentially stage bound dance numbers and Clair was moving the camera through "the real world"). Its an amazing little movie. and its a charming movie that will just make you smile. Its just a fluffy piece of enjoyment.

I'm sorry I can't say more. Its just a nice little movie and thats really all you need to know.

Besides being very amusing, this French musical feature is quite creative as well. René Clair's light touch is perfect for the material, and it gives the movie a style all its own. In particular, it stands out as one of the best of the earlier sound movies that adopted a musical format.

The story is the kind of simple but amusing premise that, in the right hands, can be built up into a hilarious situation. And that is what Clair does here - beginning with some entertaining misadventures that introduce the characters, he then sets up the main story about the lottery ticket, and from there on it builds up nicely both in humor and in complexity. The climactic sequence in the opera house is a well-crafted, extended slapstick sequence that also includes some interesting parallels.

The cast works well, with Annabella particularly standing out with her engaging performance as Béatrice.

The style is an interesting contrast from what eventually became the norm in movie musicals. The musical sequences, which vary considerably in length, are for the most part worked naturally into the flow of events, rather than being set off as separate numbers. Clair and the cast make this format work well. The overall result is a very enjoyable movie that you will also remember for its imaginative approach.

"Le Million" is a 1931 musical directed by Rene Clair. It's wonderful that it's available on DVD for audiences to see and enjoy it. The story concerns a starving Parisian artist Michele (Rene Lefevre) who is having a bad day. He is being hounded by every creditor in town, and as his fiancé Beatrice (Annabella) walks into his apartment, he is embracing his model. Then he realizes that he has won the Dutch lottery with his friend Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert), but the ticket is in his coat pocket, and the coat is gone. The city-wide hunt then begins for the coat, which was taken by Beatrice and given to a needy person, who sold it to the opera singer Sopranelli. There is a hilarious scene in Sopranelli's dressing room as various people try to get the ticket out of the coat pocket. Beatrice and Michele wind up behind some scenery on the opera stage and relate to the duet that's being sung.

This film and Clair obviously influenced such talents as the Marx Brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, and Rouben Mamoulian. All the performances are good, with the beautiful Annabella, a brunette here, a standout as the ballerina Beatrice. Annabella was signed by 20th Century Fox and brought over to America around 1938, made Suez with Tyrone Power, and the two fell in love and decided to get married. In order to dissuade her and his biggest star from marrying, Zanuck offered her several films in Europe, but she refused to leave her fiancée. Zanuck made sure she didn't work much after that, effectively blacklisting her. She had a big Broadway success, worked on behalf of the troops during World War II, and returned to France after her divorce from Power. She retired in 1954. Her radio work with Power, and this film, show what a wonderful actress she was.

Very good film - highly recommended.

French director Rene Clair was sad to see the silent era pass by. The veteran filmmaker "quiet" movies were admired during the 1920s, highlighted by his 1928 "The Italian Straw Hat." Clair viewed the early all-talking pictures, based mostly on staged plays, as relying on heavy dialogue. In his mind, the talk, talk, talk of these early audible films dragged down the visuals of what he felt movies were all about.

Clair's first part-talkie, 1930 'Under the Roofs of Paris,' still contained long silent segments to carry the plot forward. For his next movie, an adaptation of a Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemand play, Clair, in his innovative creative mind, not only accepted the new audible technology, his April 1931's "Le Million" turned out to be an inventive French musical comedy that showed the cinematic world how sound could be shaped in a new entertaining way. The tale has a poverty-stricken painter, Michel (Rene Lefevre), discovering his lottery ticket is a winner for one million Dutch florins (that's real cash). But the ticket sits inside his jacket, which he gave to his girlfriend, Beatrice (Annabella), to sew. Sympathetic to a criminal who was running from police, she gave it to him to elude the law.

Clair was one of the few auteurs at the time who wrote their own scripts, directed and edited the final version. Since part of the story deals with a ballerina (Beatrice) and is centered around a stage performance, "Le Million" contains a mix of song-and-dance numbers as well as witty dialogue. Clair was one of the first to have his songs advance the narrative of the plot instead of just stand alone set pieces solely designed to entertain. As film critic Dudley Andrew wrote, "Characters don't walk or gesture so much as half-dance their way from scene to scene."

Another cleaver use of sound occurs during the tussle for the jacket with the ticket still inside. Clair inserts a recording of a rugby crowd's cheers and applause to add an extra layer of comedy to this frenetic film. There are large segments where the visuals are shown with no dialogue, just a background soundtrack, reflecting Clair's love affair with his departed silent movie habits. As movie critic Pauline Kael noted, "no one else has ever been able to make a comedy move with such delicate, dreamlike inevitability. This movie is lyrical, choreographic, giddy--it's the best French musical of its period."

For those skeptics at the time who scoffed at talkies, and nostalgically clung to the hope audio dialogue would go by the way of the dinosaur, "Le Million" was Clair's retort to such thinking. He showed that with imagination and inventive images, including his famous opening shot of the cityscape of Paris, the visual medium could be enhanced by the imaginative use of sound to sustain a highly entertaining, uproariously humorous movie. The editors of "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" felt Clair was so successful in the new medium they included "Le Million" in their reference book.

When two starving artists learn their lottery ticket has won, the race is on, but — where's the ticket? Although as of today, this film is 82 years old, it is still one of the most watchable and enjoyable films I've seen. It has a bit of everything, humor, pathos, screwball comedy, drama...you name it. In this madcap race to find a winning lottery ticket, you may be reminded of some of the scavenger hunt films or other films such as Million Dollar Mystery, or It's a Mad Mad World, but this one stands by itself. Half Tom and Jerry cartoon, half musical, a little opera, starving artists, sly criminals, beautiful women and a really beleaguered taxi driver...and all funny. Not to be missed.