Director René Clair is similarly forgotten these days, but his influence on sound movies, especially light comedies, was huge:

‘…his métier was to enrapture us with fantasies of the sunny side of life… even though his settings were the less salubrious quarters of Paris, and his palette the old ‘square’ black and white screen, he was able to send us home with the feeling of having enjoyed all the colour and gaiety we could possibly need.  His characters sing and dance and mime as to the manner born, with none of the strain so often evidenced in the works of Chaplin…’

This movie, about the complications arising from a lost winning lottery ticket, undoubtedly brought out the best in the French director:

‘He had a trick of setting his characters against light grey backgrounds, so that the outlines of their portly, emaciated or otherwise eccentric figures might be fully taken in by the eye…’

The sets were also remarkable in employing a clever trick of design by Lazare Meerson:

‘Towards the rear of each ‘room’ the atmosphere seems pleasantly misty… this is because the rear wall is not three-dimensional but a photograph projected from a slide.  (On one occasion, in the police station, a seated gendarme is even frozen in the still.)’

Halliwell was right about the sets but wrong about the gendarme, as he moves right at the end of the scene, making you wonder why they didn’t just paint him in.  The film certainly contains much for the cineaste to chew over, but is also enjoyable on the very basic of levels:

‘Much of the fun is in seeing [the characters] collide with or narrowly miss each other, to tumble down corridors and skip down stairs as though life were nothing but fun and games.  To René Claire in Paris in 1930, it probably was.’

Halliwell put this film at number four in his list of all-time favourites…

‘It defies criticism, as perfect things do.’

 

An almost forgotten movie, made in 1931 when less than half the world’s cinemas were wired for sound.  Halliwell didn’t see it until 1949, probably at the Cambridge Film Society, where he saw many foreign language films –

‘…and in the joy of my discovery I failed to appreciate the breakthrough it had represented at the time of its release.  Now that charm, fun and romance are dirty words to film-makers, the achievement of Le Million can at last be properly understood.’