Sat 12 Sep 2009
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: IF I HAD A MILLION (1932).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews1 Comment
IF I HAD A MILLION. Paramount, 1932. Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, George Raft, W. C. Fields, Jack Oakie, and 41 featured players. Screenplay by various hands, based on the novel Windfall by Robert D. Andrews. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen Roberts, Norman McLeod, James Cruze, William A. Seiter, and H. Bruce Humberstone. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.
The premise of this eight-part anthology film is that wealthy John Glidden (Richard Bennett), close to death, dissatisfied with his life and wanting to do some good before he dies, decides to give his fortune away in the form of million dollar checks to strangers.
The film seems to include every name actor on the Paramount lot at the time, but the sequence that is best known is “Road Hogs,” directed by Norman McLeod. It features W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as former, down-on-their-Iuck vaudevillians who, with the check that Emily La Rue (Skipworth) receives, buy the car of their dreams.
When the car is demolished by a road hog, the pair buy a fleet of cars and, followed by their new purchases, each with its own driver, they take the lead in an afternoon’s drive during which they demolish the car of every road hog who tries to cross their path, until, they drive off triumphantly in the last undamaged car.
The narrative spectrum includes a forger trying, without success, to cash his check, a death-row prisoner relieved to have a fortune to leave to his wife, and, in the shortest and most pointed of the stories, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, a lowly clerk (Charles Laughton) who finds the perfect way to pay back his employer for years of indignities inflicted upon him.
As might be expected, the film is uneven, but it’s never less than entertaining, and at its best, a wonderful display of the writing, directing and acting talent available at Paramount in the early 1930s.
September 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
These anthology films are almost always uneven, but still produce some classics like Flesh and Fantasy, Dead of Night, or O Henry’s Full House. Tales of Manhattan is a rarity in that none of the segments are weak or fail. It follows the effect of a suit of evening clothes on the various people who own it, including Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Paul Robeson, and Edward G. Robinson.
There is a good lesser known Brit one devoted to mystery called Three Cases of Murder, one of the stories oddly enough based on a non Michael Shayne by Brett Halliday (“You Killed Elizabeth”). Also the eerie “In the Picture” by Roderick Wilkinson, and Orson Welles in Maugham’s Lord Mountdrago.
Of course there were several good collections of Maugham short stories (Quartet etc.) and then a whole spate of horror films in the genre starting in the late sixties.
My vote for the worst of the lot may be Christmas Eve, a loosely connected tale of how wealthy Ann Harding’s three foster sons George Brent, Randolph Scott, and George Raft come to her rescue when her crooked lawyer tries to go after her fortune. The Brent and Scott segments are more or less comic and the Raft segment, very nearly early noir, really jarring. It’s a bit as if someone decided John Payne’s lawyer in Miracle on 34th Street should have been defending Kris Kringle on a murder charge. Not that removing the sequence would do this one any good.
It’s a Big Country is another that doesn’t quite work despite a cast that includes Gary Cooper (wasted) and William Powell (charming as usual), and The Yellow Rolls Royce a notable big budget bomb despite a cast including Rex Harrison, Ingrid Bergman, Omar Sharif, and George C. Scott.
A minor one worth catching is The Dirty Game, which is even more uneven that most, but has a good segment with French actor Andre Bourvil, he of the magnificent hang dog look, as an unlikely James Bond stand-in.