Terry is one in a million

4:22pm Wednesday 9th April 2008

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THE director of Life of Brian and Wind in the Willows, Terry Jones, opened the Borderlines Film Festival’s Great Directors Season at The Courtyard on Saturday by introducing his audience to the forgotten charms of the 1931 Le Million.

Le Million, which was filmed only three years after the introduction of sound and claimed to be the first musical film, (its director Rene Clair was convinced that talking films would kill cinema) influenced both Chaplin and the Marx Brothers.

“The great thing about Borderlines is that it’s a communal activity,” said the Monty Python star. “What could be better than everyone in the countryside turning off their small screens and getting together to watch the Big Screen instead?” Considered one of 1930s cinema’s most stylish innovators, Clair gently exposed social absurdity through deliberately artificial farces such as his most famous film, The Italian Straw Hat. Le Million 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. It closes, though, with a sentiment that’s bang up to date, about how easy it is to say money isn’t everything when you have it – give it away and it might be more credible, sing the cast as they celebrate the successful recovery of the lost ticket.