French writer/director René Clair had something of a charmed career from his first silents to his early sound features (late ‘20s thru 1933). Everyone has their own favorite. (SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS/’30, anyone? https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/04/sous-les-tois-de-paris-under-roofs-of.html) But his luck ran out (or was it his talent?; he never quite regained his standing) on this mega-flop satire on money & international finance. Playing like a aria-free operetta, it’s a reverse-image MERRY WIDOW; here The Merry Bachelor. That’s middle-aged Max Dearly, the richest man in the world, called to return (with checkbook) to his country of birth as financial savior and proposed spouse of the country’s much younger princess. Only this Native Son has stipulations: citizens must become a productive labor force, not the casino freeloaders they’d been before recent bankruptcies at the country’s gambling palaces shut off the spigot. Meanwhile, the Princess already has a young lover, a secret baby, too. Over-dressed funny sets & funny costumes combined with over-eager funny playing hardly help. Much painfully unfunny. Clair imagining that everything is funnier when repeated a dozen times. Yikes! Film scholars tell us that the film failed from Political Party Line critical response: for the LEFT a betrayal; for the RIGHT, a false prediction. But even centrists bailed on this one.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The year before, The Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP/’33, took on WAR instead of ECONOMICS, and hit all the marks Clair missed.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *MILLIARDAIRE = BILLIONAIRE.
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