Day 71: Le Million (1931)

Rene Clair’s comedic masterpiece “Le Million” is a rousing musical that has become a staple of early popular French cinema as well as a defining landmark in the artistry of early sound in film. At a time where many were still grasping how to technically deal with the new invention of recorded cinema sound, Clair bravely moves into the relatively new technology and begins to form it into something that serves an artistic niche that had yet to be discovered.

In “Le Million,” Michel Bouflette (Rene Lefevre) is an artist with several debts to be paid, but only empty pockets. On the run from his creditors and in trouble with his fiancé Beatrice (Annabella), it looks like Michel’s finally out of options and in deep water, but, suddenly, he finds out that he’s won a lottery worth a million Dutch florins and all he has to do is have his ticket claimed. And there’s the rub. Though the ticket is safely kept in his jacket pocket, his jacket has gone missing after Beatrice gave it to a kind old man, who was running from the police!

With the ticket in the jacket pocket and the jacket anywhere in Paris, Michel and Beatrice find themselves on a madcap rat race to get the ticket before a rival, who was one number away from winning himself, beats them to it. Encountering one upset after the other, this wayward couple will have to journey from the city’s dirty streets all the way to the Paris Opera stage and back again if they ever hope to claim the millions of riches just out of their grasp and, along they way, they just might remember why they fell in love in the first place.

Released in 1931, “Le Million” came out only four years after the “The Jazz Singer,” the first talking picture, but, unlike anyone before, director Rene Clair harnessed this new technology and used it to bring a sense of artistry to sound, helping it to move the story forward, but also bring something contextual to the whole picture. Adapting a popular stage play, Clair did the opposite of what you think a man tackling the new medium of sound would do- he cut most of the dialogue. Seeing sound as something that should enhance a film instead of act as a crutch for poor visual explanation, Clair took many of the play’s best moments and turned them into musical numbers that serve the film both visually and audibly better than simply having character prattle on to one another.

Not only did Clair see early on the dangers of relying too heavily on one aspect of this new two-part film experience, he also was a leader in sound design in film, having sound work for the story in very specific ways that only sound could. For one, “Le Million” has two whole musical numbers that are sung as the characters sit thinking opposed to actually singing. Never done before, this act of sound representing a thought instead of actual spoken words was an entirely new concept to film as obviously such a thing could not been done properly in silent film. Also, in the third act of the film, Clair has several of his characters struggle for possession of the jacket and, as they throw it back and forth to one another, the director replaces their audio with that of a football match, adding not only humor, but an entirely new aspect to the chase, allowing the audience to now seen it as even more of a game than before.

Using sound as a creative tool like no one before, Rene Clair’s “Le Million” is as fun and silly as they day it was released and will remain an optimistic classic about life, love, and riches for generations to come.

To learn more about “Le Million,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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