50 Million Frenchmen

The title suggests a saucy, sophisticated pre-Code bonbon, but oh dear. Oh Dear, Oh Dear...

Warner Bros. Had bankrolled the 1929 Broadway original of this production, but by the time it went before the cameras in August 1930 the public had had enough of musicals and the studio in desperation completely cut out the Cole Porter score (only 'You Do Something to Me' is heard on the soundtrack as incidental music) and instead tried to turn it into a vehicle for Olsen & Johnson. After pretending it might just all go away, Warner Bros. Eventually slipped it into cinemas in February 1931 where it swiftly died at the box office (although it was released abroad still with its songs intact, in a version now lost).

At least in 1931 the thing was in Technicolor, but now lacking even that embellishment it just looks cheap and tawdry and the hotel setting stagey and drab. (The most obvious remaining evidence that it was ever in colour is a joke by Johnson about a parrot blushing, and the heavy makeup worn by leading man William Gaxton). Gaxton has been saddled with playing that tired old cliché, a millionaire playboy talked into temporarily giving up his millionaire lifestyle for a wager; not that the film does much with the idea.

For anybody hoping for pre-Code raciness, the humour is just coarse, with a creepy amount of lingering on ladies' underwear; and the gruesome sight of Olsen & Johnson modelling a pair of nighties. Several other reviewers have already commented on Johnson's laugh; which grows on you like fingernails down a blackboard. Bela Lugosi makes a fleeting appearance as a magician; but if you blinked you'd miss him.