the coat
makes the man
by Douglas Messerli
René Clair (screenplay, based on a
play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemand, and director) Le Million / 1931
The major “figure” in René Clair’s
delightful comedy, Le Million, is not
a human but, as in the Gogol short story, a coat, this a threadbare suit coat.
Within its pockets lies a winning lottery ticket owned by Michel Bouflette (René Lefèvre) who is
busy with another woman, when his girlfriend, Beatrice (Annabella), takes it
away to mend. When she discovers her lover with another woman she gives she
passes on the coat to a visiting criminal on the run from the police, a chase
scene that includes nearly all the tenants of building, that ends with the
thief, Granpere Tulip (Paul Ollivier) hiding out in her room.
If my description seems to make little
sense, so does the film, upon retelling, become more and more outlandish. For
Clair’s work does not simply involve several Keystone Kop like chases,
inexplicable characters such as Tulip and his “gang” of thieves, an
artist-friend of Bouflette’s, Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) who betrays his
friend, a haughty opera tenor who later purchases the coat to wear in a
production of The Bohemians, and an
opera-stage battle similar to that of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera of a few years later, but the work is musical
that even sings of the moral conditions of its characters, particularly of
Prosper.
In short, to make logical sense of the
antic events of the plot would be senseless. Clair’s work demands that the
viewer, as in the later Marx Brothers’ work, let go of all reason and sit back
and laugh at the insanity portrayed. With nearly everyone on the chase for the
coat and its lottery ticket, characters come and go, in and out of rooms, with
the swiftness of subway turnstile. Women seduce men, men seduce women; ballet
dancers prance into operas that contain no dances, gangsters join singers upon
the stage (as in Porter’s Kiss Me Kate),
and taxi cab drivers join up with butchers, grocers, bartenders, and renters to
get their part of “le million” the lottery ticket offers its rightful owner. If
Tulip is a criminal, he is also the philandering hero’s savior, producing the
missing lottery ticket when it appears all is lost, an act that sends everyone
into a long line of absurdly merry dancing. Whether, after paying off all those
he owes, Bouflette will have any money left to live on is questionable. Does it
matter? Everybody wins in this trifle of a film, which proves that the coat
makes the man!
For all of its light merriment, however,
Clair’s frothy confection, in the end, seems fairly empty. Money is at the
center of everything, and even though the picture’s end returns the central
character to his “true” lover, shows up the self-inflated tenor and his
gargantuan soprano as snobbish fools, and permits everyone to escape the
clutches of the power-hungry police, variations of greed still seem to be at
the heart of this phantasmagoric fable. This Beatrice spends more time leading
her Dante astray than guiding him through heaven. As the two interlopers who
begin this movie look down into the frenzied cast of characters twining through
the rooms below, the audience also can only feel a bit like the outsiders
observing the fun that will result, surely, in one grand hangover.
Los Angeles, March 15, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March
2014).
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