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Special Features
- New digital transfer, with restored image and sound
- New, improved English subtitles -- and every song lyric is translated for for the first time!
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The plot is precisely as airy and as farcically complicated as it needs to be. Suffice it to say that there's this threadbare jacket with a winning lottery ticket in the pocket. It becomes separated from its starving-artist owner and leads him and numerous others a merry chase over the roofs of Paris, through the urban underworld, and onto the very stage of the Opera. You'll wonder more than once whether the Marx Brothers were taking notes.
For no good reason whatsoever, Le Million remained out of circulation for decades, except for a few bleary dupe videos. Now we have a crystal-clear DVD that does full justice to Lazare Meerson's ethereal settings, Georges Périnal's luminous camerawork, the enchanting beauty of leading lady Annabella, and René Clair's world-class comedy masterpiece. There shall be dancing in the streets. --Richard T. Jameson
Product Description
Customer Reviews
In 1931, the year this film was made, European cinema was just beginning to catch up with the technical achievements made in the United States in the late 1920s. The period from 1929 to the early 1930s was an extraordinary time, as the art struggled with perfecting the new ability to record soundtracks. For a brief period of time, the world of cinema was awash with a world of possibilities, and in Hollywood Ernst Lubitsch made perhaps the first lasting musical films in a string of productions (THE LOVE PARADE, MONTE CARLO, and THE SMILING LIEUTENANT by 1931, and later ONE HOUR WITH YOU and THE MERRY WIDOW) that borrowed heavily from the operetta, a form that tragically-based on the extraordinary success achieved by Lubitsch and later Clair and Mamoulian-failed to survive for long.
LE MILLION was essentially an attempt to do in France what Ernst Lubitsch was doing so successfully in Hollywood. The transition was an easy one, especially given that Lubitsch, the European expatriate, was setting all of his films in Europe. Rene Clair, however, added many touches of his own. The humor he employs in the film is laced with a degree of slapstick that simply wasn't Lubitsch's style. This film is a romp through Paris, and romping wasn't Lubitsch's mode of travel.
... Read more ›"Le Million" is one of a handful of musical comedies that I'd watch over and over. The plotline is simple: retrieve a lottery ticket from a jacket that was given away to a stranger. Sounds easy, right? Not if director Rene Clair has his way! He adds plot twists, mistaken identities, disloyal friends, goldigging sexpots, and some pretty funny slapstick. Get ready for the most entertaining 90 minutes you've spent in a long time. It's interesting to see how many of the actors still relied on silent film methods of acting (lots of facial expressions and body language), even though this is a full-fledged "talkie". And Annabella provides wonderful visual and aural beauty.
The songs are corny beyond belief but, fortunately, they're few so it's bearable. The corniness doesn't make them bad, just hopelessly out of date. They do help the story along nicely though, and the new lyric translation helps a lot. Despite being fluent in French, I had trouble understanding some of the lyrics, probably due to early recording limitations which occasionally cause muffled sound during loud passages. But this is minor and only occurs during the songs. Criterion did a wonderful job with the restoration as a whole. The print is clear and bright, with only very small segments showing any wear. The dialog is easy to understand and is crisp.
I did have some problems with the subtitles, however. There are a few sentences in which they are wildly inaccurate.
... Read more ›Beyond having an amusing plot, Le Million moves along briskly, ending with the classic chase so familiar to French cinema, a tradition which it helped to establish.
In summary, an entertaining film today, and a technical masterpiece of its time, as important to sound pictures as Battleship Potemkin is to montage. A cinema milestone from one of the great directors in the history of film.
Michel (René Lefevre), a poor artist, shares a garret with his best friend, Prosper. Michel's girl friend, Beatrice (Annabella), lives across the hall. Then Michel discovers he has won the lottery with a prize of one million Dutch florins. But where did he put the ticket? Ah, yes, in the pocket of his coat. But he gave the old coat to Beatrice to mend. And when she saw Michel sitting very close to his model, Vanda, she angrily gave the coat away to a poor man who appeared in her room with a story about being chased. And the poor man, Grandpa Tulip, turns out to be a ringleader of a group of thieves. When he gets back to his store, where he sells all the stolen goods he receives, he tosses the old coat on a pile of clothing. And just then tenor Sopranelli enters the store looking for an old coat as part of his costume for an opera concert he's giving that night at the Opera Lyrique. "A great artist," he points out, "must pay attention to the slightest details." Soon everyone is after the coat, including all of Michel's creditors. And all this frenetic comedy is played out with songs. Le Million was one of the first, if not the first, musical comedies of the sound era.
The music pervades the movie, jaunty, romantic and light hearted, from fragments the characters' consciences sing to themselves to the long and sweet opera scene to the joyous opening and closing. Even the thieves have a song...
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