If I Had a Million (Paramount, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the Lifetime movie The Perfect Wedding and then followed it up with a DVD of one of the quirkiest movies from Hollywood in the early 1930’s: If I Had a Million. This one was made in 1932 by an all-star lineup of stars, writers and directors from Paramount, though the main reason it gets shown today is that W. C. Fields was in it (it was included in the boxed set of 18 Fields films from Paramount and Universal I bought recently), centered around a story premise from writer Robert Hardy Andrews (oddly listed as Robert D. Andrews on his credit). An aging multimillionaire named John Glidden (Richard Bennett, father of Constance and Joan Bennett and a star in his own right in an earlier generation; his final film, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, would also cast him as an aging tycoon facing imminent death), whose going businesses include a shipyard, a steel mill, a construction company and a bank, is disgusted by both the people on his staff who would presumably take over his businesses after his death and the greedy relatives who are crowding around him waiting for him to croak so they can grab his fortune. (One of them has a bratty kid who plays a bit of the song “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” on a phonograph, and Glidden overhears it and says the kid is the only honest one of the bunch.) So, instead of leaving his fortune to any of them, he decides to pick 10 people at random from the phone book and give $1 million to each of them in a certified check – a form of money my husband Charles said banks don’t issue anymore, which guarantees that the money has already been earmarked for the check’s recipient and therefore there’s no chance the check will bounce. Andrews’ basic story frame introduces a number of different plot lines about what various people would do with such a dramatic windfall, and among the directors assigned to film the segments were Ernst Lubitsch and James Cruze along with Norman McLeod, H. Bruce Humberstone, Norman Taurog (who filmed the prologue establishing the basic plot and a surprise epilogue – more on that later), Lothar Mendes, William A. Seiter and Stephen Roberts. Surprisingly, the best directors didn’t always turn in the best sequences – between them Roberts and Humberstone turned in the best ones while Lubitsch’s and Cruze’s were the most disappointing.

The first segment, directed by McLeod (who after his Marx Brothers’ movies Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, seems to have become Paramount’s go-to director for zany comedy), features Charlie Ruggles as a put-upon worker in a china shop. He used to work in the firm’s office but he got a promotion to work on the shop floor – which technically included a raise, only every time he breaks a piece his pay is docked for it, so he’s actually making less money than he was. When he gets a check that’s $11 less than it would have been if he hadn’t broken anything, his wife (Mary Boland, who played the nagging wife of Charlie Ruggles in a whole series of their films together, including a later one with Fields, Six of a Kind) tears into him about it and he has a dream in which all the big, fragile pieces in the store (including a faux “Chinese” head) are glaring at him. Of course,.when he gets his random million he goes to the store, breaks everything in sight and then tells them to send him the bill. There’s a segment featuring Wynne Gibson – one of those actresses who got a big buildup but slipped through the cracks, though her performance here is indelible – as Violet Smith, a “woman of the streets” who in her opening scene gets pawed by a sailor who’s trying to pick her up in a bar (with the relatively honest depiction of sexuality in the so-called “pre-Code” era of 1932, the film doesn’t come right out and say she’s a prostitute but it comes as close as the filmmakers would dare to doing so). After Glidden bestows his $1 million on her, she uses it to rent a hotel room for one night and sleep in luxury – in a telling moment, she removes one of the two pillows from the double bed and puts the remaining one dead center to emphasize that this is one night she’ll be spending blessedly alone. The scene is one of the most powerful in the film and expertly directed by Stephen Roberts, who also did the movie’s final episode (once again, more on that later).

The next segment, directed by Humberstone, is one of the film’s grimmest: George Raft plays Henry Jackson, who has a long record for forgery – so when he tries either to cash the check or open an account with him, everyone assumes he’s forged it. As he gets more and more desperate (and the usual lackadaisical Humberstone stages his plight in shots that get closer and closer to proto-noir) Jackson ends up in a flophouse, where he doesn’t even have the obligatory dime for a bed for the night. He gives the flophouse owner the $1 million check, and the guy – who also assumes the check is no good – holds it to a gas jet in his establishment and sets it on fire so he can light his cigar with it. The scene everyone remembers in the film is the one with W. C. Fields, who plays Rollo, the live-in partner of retired vaudevillian Emily La Rue – played by the magnificent character actress Alison Skipworth, who made two more films with Fields after this (Tillie and Gus and Six of a Kind; she also played a sex-changed version of Casper Gutman in the 1936 film Satan Met a Lady, the second and weakest of the three versions of The Maltese Falcon, though she’s great in it) and was one of the few performers of either gender who could keep up with him on screen. Unlike a lot of other vaudevillians, Emily husbanded her money, and after she got too old to perform she opened a tea shop (though judging from its signage it’s also a full-service restaurant) and it’s doing well enough she can finally afford the one luxury she’s dreamed about all these years: her own car. (It’s interesting how as late as 1932 this film still treats a personal automobile as a luxury item.) She doesn’t seem to be able to drive, so Rollo does that for her. (The imdb.com page for the film listed Rollo’s last character as “La Rue,” indicating that he and Emily are married, but there’s nothing that specifies that in the actual film – and the framing scene that introduces Emily, talking to one of her own vaudeville friends, suggests that they aren’t: her friend asks Emily whatever happened to Rollo, and Emily says, “He’s right here.”) Alas, a hit-and-run driver crashes into Emily’s car and totals it just minutes after she got it, and so when Emily gets her $1 million she and Rollo use it to buy a fleet of used cars, hire a cadre of drivers and organize what Charles jokingly called a “road-rage squad” to drive all road hogs off the streets and demolish their cars. The sequence, directed by Norman McLeod, is brilliantly staged and quite funny even though it harkens back to Mack Sennett and the Keystone style of broad slapstick.

Then the film shifts towards irony as one of Glidden’s $1 million handouts goes to John Wallace (Gene Raymond) on the night he’s about to be executed for his participation in a robbery in which someone was killed. When his $1 million arrives he’s sure he’ll be reprieved so he can use his good fortune to find a quality attorney who can get him a new trial, or at least have his sentence commuted to spare him the electric chair. His wife Mary (Frances Dee) visits him on the night of his scheduled execution, and though he doesn’t really want to see her under these circumstances he’s still convinced the money will set him free – until they take him to the death chamber and he realizes they’re going to kill him on schedule, though at least he can take comfort in that his wife will be able to survive him comfortably. This could have been one of the film’s most powerful scenes, except that it goes haywire in Cruze’s direction; he’d been a top director in the silent era, had seemed to make the transition to sound all right with his 1929 film The Great Gabbo, and a year after If I Had a Million would make a marvelous movie, I Cover the Waterfront, but within five years he’d be reduced to directing “B”’s for Republic (including the original version of Gangs of New York, later remade by Martin Scorsese – who also made The Aviator, a biopic about Howard Hughes, who produced James Cruze’s great 1928 anti-racist film The Mating Call), but Gene Raymond and Frances Dee, usually understated actors, both turn in such intensely overwrought performances (the worst in the movie) that Charles expected a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style denouement in which it would turn out they were actors doing a play about a man about to be executed.

The next segment is “The Clerk,” written and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, which casts Charles Laughton as an anonymous office drone named Phineas T. Lambert who works in a huge office with a whole regiment of other people, sitting at identical desks lined up in a military-style formation (a depiction of office work copied from King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd and used by innumerable directors since, including Alfred Hitchcock in his early masterpiece Rich and Strange and Billy Wilder in The Apartment). When he gets his million he ascends a series of staircases and goes through a succession of doors announcing the occupants of these private offices until he gets to the one of the president of the company and blows a big “razzberry” in his face. Garson Kanin’s book Hollywood recalled this as one of the greatest scenes in moviedom, which it isn’t; it’s a disappointing payoff and the earlier “China Shop” sequence with Charlie Ruggles had done the gag of the put-upon proletarian getting his revenge far better. The next scene is one of those rather sad stories in which one laughs but one also feels sorry for the three buddies who literally let a fortune slip through their fingers: they are Marines Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper), Mulligan (Jack Oakie) and O’Brien (Roscoe Karns) – one wonders if there’s an ethnic slur intended given that all three have Irish names. They are cut-ups who brawl, gamble and spend most of their time in the guard house; in one of their rare evenings outside they chat up a woman who works at a hot-dog stand near a carnival, and they trade the $1 million check – thinking it’s someone’s gag – to the stand’s owner in exchange for hot dogs and $10 so they can take her to the carnival. They have their evening with her, and the next time they see her she’s getting into a fancy car with the hot-dog stand owner, both of them dressed to the nines, and Gallagher stares at the camera and, with Gary Cooper’s fabled laconicism, says, “I wonder if that check was good after all.”

The final segment, directed by Roberts, is arguably the best part of the film: it’s set at an old-age home for women run by Mrs. Garvey (Blanche Frederici), who runs the place with all the sensitivity of Auschwitz and refuses to allow the inmates – oops, I mean the residents – to play cards with each other or do anything else that might be remotely fun. This time Glidden’s $1 million goes to Mary Walker (May Robson), about the only resident of the house who rebels against Garvey’s insane rules and regimentation, and when she gets the money she uses it to buy the house, force Mrs. Garvey and the establishment’s equally obnoxious cook to sit in rocking chairs all day (she continues to pay them but says she’ll fire them if they do anything else), and turns the house into a fun place where she and her fellow senior women can play cards to their heart’s content and use the kitchen to make anything they want to eat. This includes not only biscuits (before her windfall Mary had been chewed out by Garvey and the cook for wanting to use the home’s kitchen to bake biscuits) but pies, which she starts regularly sending to Glidden at his office so he can enjoy them and she can thank him for the windfall. In fact Glidden is so overjoyed at finally being treated like a human being that he starts hanging out at the old women’s home and having a good time, finally having realized that he had essentially wasted his life working so hard to become ever-richer and he had neglected the simple pleasures that really give life meaning. The ending is startlingly similar to that of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, made six years later, and the whole film is full of Capra connections: May Robson would star in Capra’s Lady for a Day the next year (and Capra in his autobiography made it seem like she’d never made a movie before; in fact it was her 27th film: she made her debut in a 1908 one-reeler and by the time she made If I Had a Million she’d been in important movies like the first, silent version of Chicago – playing the prison matron Queen Latifah played in the 2002 musical – Letty Lynton with Joan Crawford and Red-Headed Woman and Dinner at Eight with Jean Harlow). Gary Cooper would later make two films with Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe, and one of the writers on this project, Sidney Buchman, would work with Capra on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

At least two of the writers involved in If I Had a Million, Buchman and Lester Cole, were Communist Party U.S.A. members, which may account for the veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist sentiments sprinkled throughout this movie – and the final sequence is also an indictment of how the U.S. treated old people before the advent of Social Security, where they were utterly dependent on the ability and willingness to support them of their kids (and if they hadn’t had kids they were really up the proverbial creek) and were often reduced to begging or scrounging up whatever sort of living they could. (Of course, today’s Libertarian Republicans would call those “the good old days.”) If I Had a Million is also an indication that the modern-day anthology movies aren’t anything new (they weren’t even in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when British producers made Quartet and Trio, anthology films based on short stories by W. Somerset Maugham), and as with the 1934 film The Captain Hates the Sea – a very strange movie that seems to go out of its way to avoid a plot through-line – it plays so much like a Robert Altman film I wonder why Altman didn’t seek the rights and remake it. Charles and I both noticed plot holes in the movie – notably that at the start all John Glidden’s businesses are going concerns, and he would have had to liquidate them to turn them into cash, a process that would have taken months – yet his decision to give away his money is presented as impulsive. (Of course it’s possible his business would have had a $10 million cash reserve as well as the actual illiquid businesses.) And Charles also pointed out that in the George Raft sequence, Eddie Jackson could have gone to the bank that actually issued Glidden’s check, where they would have known it was good, opened an account and withdrawn some of the money immediately – but this is one movie in which the Kafka-esque predicament Jackson finds himself in is more powerful drama than a more accurate story would have been.