Le Million
Directed by René Clair
France | 1931 | Fiction | 85 mins | French w/English subtitles
***Opening Night film***
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?
This early sound film had a profound impact not only on the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, but on the American musical as a whole. "At the onset of the sound era, French cinema was in the doldrums, economically and artistically, until Clair’s ebullient early talkies proved a great success worldwide and put French sound film on the map. All of them take place in an enchanting Paris, marvelously designed by the great art director Lazare Meerson, and lit by Georges Périnal with exquisite soft-toned atmospheric cinematography. [...] At first Clair was skeptical of the value of sound and detested the loquacious movies of the early talkie era, with their slavish devotion to dialogue. Soon, however, he altered his views: realizing the creatively non-realistic use to which the soundtrack could be put, he employed sound contrapuntally rather than synchronously, divorcing the literal relationship of sound and image, and never permitting the words and pictures to duplicate each other." ~ Elliot Stein. This approach to the use of sound and music in film is nowhere more evident than in Le Million's iconic opening sequence.