Rene Clair's "Le Million" …, like his earlier "Sous les Toits de Paris," is one of those rare pictures that make you their willing captive immersed in their mood and letting yourself be carried away on the wings of their fancy. In "Le Million" the fancy is much more exuberant than it was in the other picture, but it enforces submission upon you just as effectively, so that like everybody else around you, you inevitably exclaim: "What charm! What invention! What fun!" This spontaneous reaction, confirmed by the laudations you hear on all sides, is sufficient proof of the unique qualities of the film. It is the work of an artist who sees beyond the obvious and who can view the comedy of life with a good-natured cynicism that proclaims its authentic "sophistication." From under this gentle leg-pulling there gradually emerges a fantastic world inhabited by not quite normal human beings who now and again burst into dancing and singing that reveals their hidden kinship with puppets. It is René Clair's great achievement as an artist that though his characters' behavior is at times so grotesquely fantastic, it never appears incongruous with their surroundings or inconsistent with their more normal actions. But the achievement is a tour de force that only disguises its fundamental weakness.

The problem that René Clair sets himself to solve in "Le Million" is the old one of screen musical comedy. It has repeatedly been proved that the forms of singing and dancing seen in stage musical comedy are intolerably false and incongruous when transferred to the screen…. Now René Clair attempts to justify musical comedy by means that are directly opposite to those of Hollywood. Instead of making singing and dancing more natural, more in accord with the daily life of his characters, he makes the daily life of his characters more unnatural, more in accord with stage singing and dancing. Thus the story of a lost lottery ticket becomes a series of madcap adventures in which the normal is hardly distinguishable from the eccentric. Clair's success in this daring experiment reveals the measure of his talent as an entirely convincing and vastly entertaining interpreter of human foibles. But his fantastic treatment is even more restricted in its application than the naturalistic one of Hollywood. Moreover, his approach to the problem of musical comedy is confined to the choice of subject, whereas the only way to solve the problem is to discover a cinematic form that would make dancing and singing spring as freely from the nature of the screen entertainment as they spring from the nature of the stage performance. (pp. 645-46)