Le Million ***** (1931, Annabella, René Lefèvre, Jean-Louis Allibert) – Classic Movie Review 9915

René Lefèvre stars as Michel, an impoverished Parisian artist who turns Paris upside-down in a desperate search for his winning million florins Dutch lottery ticket, left in the pocket of his old jacket, given away by his fiancée Béatrice (Annabella) to a stranger in need to elude the police, and stolen by a man who sells it to to a tenor singer at the opera house, where the cast converges frantically to track down the jacket and the ticket.

Director René Clair’s 1931 Le Million [The Million] is a clever, delightfully inventive, entertaining farcical comedy with songs (based on a stage original). It has been hailed as the best earliest film musical and still has a freshness and a naive winning charm that many of the films it influenced have been unable to retain.

Clair’s smart screenplay is based on the play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud.

Also in the cast are Annabella, Paul Ollivier, Jean-Louis Allibert, Vanda Gréville, Raymond Cordy, Odette Talazac, and Constantin Siroesco.

Le Million [The Million] is directed by René Clair, runs 81 minutes, is made by Films Sonores Tobis, is released by Films Sonores Tobis (1931) (France) and American Tobis Company (1931) (US), is written by René Clair, based on the play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud, is shot in black and white by Georges Périnal and Georges Raulet, is produced by Frank Clifford, is scored  by Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès and Georges Van Parys, and is designed by Lazare Meerson.

It was released in France on 15 April 1931.

It is Clair’s second sound film, following the 1930 Under the Roofs of Paris [Sous les toits de Paris], probably the earliest French example of a filmed musical comedy. These are two of his trail-blazing masterworks, but ironically he had distrusted sound, saying that it was ‘an unnatural creation, just useful for canned theatre’.

It was released in The Criterion Collection in 2004 in the US on DVD.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9915

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