The first time sound was heard in a cinema (on a soundtrack) was in 1927, when Al Jolson spoke the famous words, “Wait a minute; wait a minute… you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in Warner Bros’ The Jazz Singer.  The first ‘all-talking’ movie was the same studio’s Lights of New York, made a year later.  Le Million was released in 1931, and it’s quite astonishing when you watch it to think that it was made that soon in the sound era, so adept is its use of the medium.

The opera sequence surely inspired the Marx Brothers’ madcap antics in A Night at the Opera, even retaining the same production: Il Trovatore.  Halliwell comments on Réne Clair’s distinctive use of sound, which was in its infancy at the time –

‘Le Million is told almost entirely in recitative and song, a method infrequently copied.  Mamoulian in Love Me Tonight… had some good stabs at it, and Lubitsch in One Hour With You applied it rather daringly to high comedy, adding some speeches… Milestone in Hallelujah I’m a Bum flopped rather desperately and more or less killed the career of Al Jolson; so by 1933 the brief fashion had waned.  One might claim that it was revived in the sixties by Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but that film was almost entirely sung and this invites comparison with light opera rather than with Clair’s fluffy combination of styles.’

 

Year: 1931