Le million

France

1931

81 Min

1.33:1

French

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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CAST Annabella, René Lefèvre, Louis Allibert, Raymond Cordy, Paul Ollivier, Vanda Gréville, Odette Talazac, Constantin Stroesco

MUSIC Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, Georges van Parys

Melbourne

Synopsis

An impoverished artist discovers he has purchased a winning lottery ticket at the very moment his creditors come to collect. The only problem is, the ticket is in the pocket of his coat. . . which he left at his girlfriend’s apartment. . . who gave the coat to a man hiding from the police. . . who sells the coat to an opera singer who uses it during a performance. By turns charming and inventive, René Clair’s lyrical masterpiece had a profound impact on not only the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, but on the American musical as a whole. —The Criterion Collection

Director

René Clair

In 1920 René-Lucien Chomette began acting in films under the name René Clair. He performed in Louis Feuillade’s 1921 serials L’Orpheline and Parisette, but in 1924 he began writing and directing his own films with the comic fantasy Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray). Through the ‘20s Clair would make some of the most original and admired works of early French cinema, including the avant-garde short Entr’acte, the landmark early musicals Sous Les Toits De Paris and Le Million, and the classic satire A Nous La Liberté. Working in England and the United States during the 1930s and ’40s, his films were dominated (sometimes overly so) by fantasy and whimsy, but he managed to inject some healthy venom into the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None. He returned to Europe for his films of the 1950s and ’60s, most notably La Beauté Du Diable (Beauty And The Devil) and Les Belles De Nuit (Beauties Of The Night).
—allmovie guide

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Jon

15Apr12

Amazing, innovative, musical, magical, refreshing. The sequence where Michel and Béatrice sit on stage, hidden behind the decor as the opera singers both narrate and inform their interactions, is a mini-movie masterpiece in itself.

trolley freak

4Oct11

His reputation may have faded but there's no doubt that in the early 1930's Clair was one of the most innovative director's in the early days of talking pictures. This charming film is a case in point. Released the same year as another of his great films, A Nous La Liberte, the story is of a struggling artist being hounded by his many creditors. He wins the lottery but where's that pesky winning ticket? Marvellous...