Coming Soon
LE MILLION + ENTR’ACTE
1931
Director
René Clair
Starring
Annabella
René Lefèvre
Jean-Louis Allibert
Paul Ollivier
Runtime
113 minutes
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An impoverished artist discovers he has purchased a winning lottery ticket at the very moment his creditors come to collect. The only problem is, the ticket is in the pocket of his coat. . . which he left at his girlfriend’s apartment. . . who gave the coat to a man hiding from the police. . . who sells the coat to an opera singer who uses it during a performance. By turns charming and inventive, René Clair’s lyrical masterpiece LE MILLION had a profound impact on not only the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, but on the American musical as a whole.
“In Clair’s magical city of small cobbled courtyards, of bistros, drunkards and street-singers, and skylines dotted with chimney pots at odd angles, there are no villains. An unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame, operating with members of all levels of society. Clair makes full use of the celebration of movement, the balletic view of activity, the brilliant sense of comic timing and avant-garde imagery that had made his earlier comedies of the 1920s so memorable. While a good deal of European cinema of the 1930s has not stood the test of time, LE MILLION hasn’t aged a bit—seeing it today, nearly 70 years after its release, one still cannot help feeling exhilarated by its sheer audacity and grace.” - Elliott Stein
LE MILLION will be preceeded by a screening of Clair's short film ENTR’ACTE!
ENTR’ACTE opens with a cannon firing into the audience and that’s pretty much a statement of purpose for the whole movie. Clair wanted to shake up the audience, throwing it into a disorienting world of visual bravado and narrative absurdity. Still one of the best-known avant-garde films of the 1920s, ENTR’ACTE stages a series of zany, disconnected scenes, including a chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray that is swept away by a jet of water, a dizzying roller coaster course, a hearse pulled by a camel, and a high-speed chase through Paris’s Luna Park. A seminal surrealist gem!
“In Clair’s magical city of small cobbled courtyards, of bistros, drunkards and street-singers, and skylines dotted with chimney pots at odd angles, there are no villains. An unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame, operating with members of all levels of society. Clair makes full use of the celebration of movement, the balletic view of activity, the brilliant sense of comic timing and avant-garde imagery that had made his earlier comedies of the 1920s so memorable. While a good deal of European cinema of the 1930s has not stood the test of time, LE MILLION hasn’t aged a bit—seeing it today, nearly 70 years after its release, one still cannot help feeling exhilarated by its sheer audacity and grace.” - Elliott Stein
LE MILLION will be preceeded by a screening of Clair's short film ENTR’ACTE!
ENTR’ACTE opens with a cannon firing into the audience and that’s pretty much a statement of purpose for the whole movie. Clair wanted to shake up the audience, throwing it into a disorienting world of visual bravado and narrative absurdity. Still one of the best-known avant-garde films of the 1920s, ENTR’ACTE stages a series of zany, disconnected scenes, including a chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray that is swept away by a jet of water, a dizzying roller coaster course, a hearse pulled by a camel, and a high-speed chase through Paris’s Luna Park. A seminal surrealist gem!