Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

1 82 CELLULOID sound films startled London, Berlin, New York and Paris, for these wise men of the film trade had no knowledge of Clair except perhaps vaguely as a highhat director of French comedies. But the scope of sound gave Clair just the fillip for which he had been waiting, and he was clever enough to bring off his experiments in sound technique precisely at the right moment. Strictly speaking, there is little in the sound of either Sous les toils de Paris or Le Million which has not been apparent to any intelligent observer of films since sound reproduction became general. There are fresh twists of continuity devices, employing sound as well as the visual image, which have not occurred to American directors and which Clair, along with Wilhelm Thiele and Geza von Bolvary, has exploited with some skill. But in actuality the qualities which are so greatly praised in these two films were equally admirable, if not more so, in some of Clair's earlier work. Yet coming as they did, when dialogue was hanging tooth and nail on to the skirts of film technique, Clair's pictures swept everything before them, and, if I am not much mistaken, the young director finds himself with a difficult reputation up to which he must live. Le Million has been selected for inclusion among these reviews in preference to Sous les toils de Paris not because I consider it the better film — it lacks the simplicity of its predecessor — but because there will be more opportunities for seeing it during the next few months, either in its original version or in some bastard form with irritating strip-titles in English plastered across the images. In the silent days we were