Le Million

Le Million (U)

Director: Rene Clair
Starring: Rene Lefevre, Annabella, Louis Allibert
France, 1931, 1 hour 29 minutes, B/W, subtitles

Saturday 5 April 2.30pm
The Courtyard Hereford

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Considered one of '30s cinema's most stylish innovators, Clair gently exposed social absurdity through deliberately artificial farces such as his most famous film, The Italian Straw Hat. This is classic early Rene Clair, a funny, charming cinematic operetta in which the hunt for a lost lottery ticket ends in a scrum on an opera stage that foreshadows A Night at the Opera. Though in some ways dated (it features a variety of experimental devices of the time), the playing, the delightful music, and the dialogue (half-sung, half-spoken - it is sometimes claimed to be the first musical) all mesh together in a way no one but Clair ever quite matched.

The film will be introduced by Terry Jones writer, actor and director of Monty Python and The Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Wind in the Willows

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