Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
In Le Million (1931), René Clair gave us a wild scramble through the Paris of about 1930 for a winning but errant lottery ticket. From a rundown boarding house, to the hideout of a gang of thieves, via a police station, to an opera house, the madcap mayhem was underway. At the same time, Clair was revolutionizing how sound would be used in film, ever after.
Historical Background: René Clair was born René-Lucien Chomette in 1898 in Paris and lived to the age of eighty-three, passing away in 1981. He grew up in the market quarter of Paris above his father's soap shop. He received a puppet theater for his seventh birthday and soon began writing and directing his own plays. It's strange how seemingly insignificant events like that can shape a person's entire life. Clair suffered a spinal injury during World War I and was briefly incapacitated. In 1920, two new interests began to absorb his time: leftist politics and acting. He took little enjoyment from acting, however, and was soon more intrigued with the possibilities of filmmaking. He went to Brussels to work as an assistant to Jacques de Baroncelli, learning camera technique. He directed his first film The Crazy Ray, in 1924. He immediately established his propensities for wit, style, movement, and comedic timing. His first major success came with The Italian Straw Hat (1927). No sooner had he mastered the silent film medium than he was confronted with the advent of sound. Clair was among those who predicted that sound would lead to the demise of cinema, along with such geniuses of the sound era as Chaplin and Eisenstein. His fear was that the addition of sound would diminish the importance of visual imagery that filmmakers had gradually advanced to new levels of mastery during the silent era and might reduce film to mimicking theater. Rather than bemoan the dangers of sound, however, Clair set out to prove himself wrong, by exploring the creative use of sound to expand the meaning and power of visuals rather than diluting them. He made some limited use of sound in À Nous la Liberté (1931) but then created the first great sound film, Le Million, later that same year. Le Million introduced numerous innovative techniques that have since become standard filmmaking practices. It was also arguably the origin of what we now call "musicals." Apart from its historical importance, however, Le Million is a delightfully entertaining film, even from today's vantage point.
The Story: Michel (René Lefèvre) is an artist engaged to his neighbor, the sweet and lovely Béatrice (Annabella), who works as a ballerina. Michel is a bit of a cad, leaving his old threadbare jacket to be mended by Béatrice while occupying himself flirting with his current portrait model, Vanda (Vanda Gréville). When Béatrice walks in on Michel smooching with Vanda, jealousy quite naturally rears its green head. Prosper Bénévant (Jean-Louis Allibert), Michel's best friend but rival for Béatrice's affections, tries in vain to comfort her. Michel is also being hounded by creditors, who include the butcher, the baker, the milkmaid, and the landlord.
Meanwhile, the police are pursuing a con artist who goes by the name Grampa Tulip (Paul Ollivier), or Per-la Tulipe in French. He makes his escape across the rooftops but loses his jacket in the process. He descends into the building where Michel and Béatrice live, with the cops close behind. In a madcap scene, the cops are chasing Grampa Tulip and the creditors are after Michel, but the two pursuits somehow get reversed, causing both the cops and the creditors to end up nabbing the wrong man. Grandpa Tulip ducks into Béatrice's apartment and, needing a disguise, asks to borrow Michel's old jacket, still in need of repair. He then sits down at the piano and bangs out a hot number, duly obscuring his identity from the police. Béatrice agrees to let Grandpa Tulip keep the old jacket and he gives her a promise of coming to her aid, should she ever need it.
Prosper returns to the apartment building with a newspaper and big news. One of the two tickets purchased by he or Michel has won a million florins in the Dutch lottery! Michel asks Prosper if he'd like to agree to split it no matter which of them won, but Prosper refuses. Too bad for him, because when Michel checks his ledger book, it turns out that Michel's ticket was the winner. But where did he put the lottery ticket? Oh, right! He left it in his old jacket!
Well, now the film becomes a wild search for the jacket, which has already gone from Michel to Béatrice to Grandpa Tulip. Back at his gang's hideout, Grandpa Tulip sells the jacket to a supercilious American opera tenor, Sopranelli (Constantin Siroesco), while also picking the fop's watch from his pocket. Sopranelli is on tour, currently engaged at the Opera Lyrique, and wants the jacket as costume for La Boheme. Meanwhile, Prosper extracts a promise from Michel of split the winnings if Prosper can recover the ticket. All sorts of comic circumstances transpire, highlighted by a Rugby-like scrum for the jacket in the midst of La Boheme.
Theme: Even cads and deadbeats sometimes get lucky.
Production Values: One superlative aspect of the script for Le Million is the delicate balance it maintains between comedy and romance. There are plenty of satirical touches, such as when the policemen staking out the opera house break into tears listening to a love duet or when the conman turns over the missing lottery ticket because he made a promise (and conman never break promises, right?). The romantic element is magical but complicated by the fact that Michel is constantly endangering his relationship with Béatrice by his less than subtle interest in what might be under Vanda's skirt. The romantic element of the film comes to a head at the opera house. Michel and Béatrice are trapped on stage just as the curtain rises but are hidden from the audience behind a piece of the scenery. They have to remain perfectly silent while Sopranelli and a rotund diva belt out a magnificent love duet a few feet away. When the duet exactly captures what Michel and Béatrice are feeling about one another, they silently pantomime the lines. They begin to gaze into each other's eyes as the opera stars sing:
Alone are we at last tonight,
All else to their slumbers gone.
Alone are we in the failing light,
Side by side upon this bench of stone
Then, Michel expresses torment through his gestures as the tenor sings:
What sorrow clouds thy sense?
Oh heart, what is my offense?
O pity, see how I grieve.
Then, it's Béatrice's turn to pantomime the pain of her jealousy as the soprano sings:
Yes, great is my adversity.
There is no balm, no response.
Thou lovest me not, I who love thee.
Finally, they begin to reconcile as the tenor sings:
Heed not thy jealous heart.
Nothing shall keep us apart.
We are alone in the forest.
This blessed place is our shrine.
Let your hand in my hand rest
And our Fingers forever entwine.
And she melts like so much butter, as the soprano replies:
I lack the force to resist thy pleas.
I feel so weak when thou art near.
This is precisely what Clair had in mind when he talked about sound augmenting images. Clair uses both the music and, later, sound effects to comment on the action. It was highly effective and, for the time, highly original as well. Now, of course, it all seems commonplace, precisely because Clair showed the way. The two lovers are acting just as they would have in a silent film but the images are enhanced by the asynchronous opera duet. Later, Clair takes the concept a step further and introduces the sounds of fans at a soccer stadium cheering a match while we watch the various characters engage in a virtual scrum, with the coveted jacket substituting for a ball.
The musical elements of the film are really quite sophisticated. Michel's creditors act as a kind of singing Greek chorus. In some scenes, we listen to a character's interior voice – singing! The songs of the ordinary characters are stylistically somewhat between modern musicals and operettas, but all of those lovely sounds get seamlessly integrated with the operatic excerpts sung by the tenor and the soprano. The sound quality of the Criterion DVD is excellent, which is especially important, considering how much this film contributed to the creative use of sound in movies.
The camerawork is very fluid and lyrical, especially considering the relative lack of mobility of cameras back in 1931. Criterion has outdone itself in the restoration of this film. The print quality is unbelievably clean and luminous for a film of this age. One of the extras contains a short excerpt from Le Million from an ordinary print and the contrast in quality is simply amazing.
The cast gives solid performances from top to bottom. René Lefèvre is small, agile, and energetic as Michel. His comedic touch is impeccable. He later starred in The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). Annabella makes an appealingly innocent love interest, especially in her tutu, and Vanda Gréville is suitably vampy as the gold-digging Vanda. I particularly enjoyed Constantin Siroesco as the arrogant Sopranelli..
Bottom-Line:Le Million is in French with English subtitles and has a brisk running time of just 81 minutes. Criterion included few extras on the DVD, but there is a very interesting nine-minute interview from 1959 with Clair in which he talks about his notions in relation to integration of sound into film. Le Million was an international sensation in 1931 and made Clair into a legendary director. As the first true masterpiece of sound integration, Le Million is arguably among the ten most influential movies in cinematic history. Certainly, it stands as a milestone in the development of sound artistry and, ironically, from the man who initially predicted that sound would be the death of cinema. Hitchcock and Chaplin admitted to being influenced by Clair's work, but, more broadly, virtually every Hollywood (and Bollywood) musical owes a debt of gratitude, knowingly or not, to Le Million. Even without such landmark importance, this film warrants attention simply because of its entertainment value. It's as light as the meringue in a lemon meringue pie and just as tasty.
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