Shortly thereafter as Michel is predictably hounded by an angry mob of townspeople to whom he owes money, Michel and his best friend Prosper (Louis Allibert) learn that Michel is the lucky winner of the French lottery. Sure that the winnings will be the answer to all of Michel’s problems, they quickly return to retrieve the ticket from an old coat pocket, only to discover that—without realizing what was inside the pocket—Beatrice has given the worthless, tattered coat to an elderly, enterprising eccentric named Grandpa Tulip (Paul Olliver).

Complicating the deceptively simple plot even more in a way that seemed to inspire Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, Tulip later sells the jacket to an Italian tenor named Ambrosio Sopranelli (Constantin Siroesco) who feels it’s the ideal wardrobe for the character he’s playing that evening in the opera before he journeys over to America to further his career. Now with time running out before the curtain goes up, Michel and Prosper follow leads both separately and together, trying to win back the trust and affection of ballerina Beatrice along the way as they strive to claim their ticket, with the creditors and the beautiful Vanda Greville trailing them from only a few steps behind.

Fans of classic Marx Brothers comedies will immediately see the influence as Le Million gets increasingly chaotic, with characters just missing one another, the few maddening misunderstandings mixed in for maximum tension, and of course music throughout. However, while the music sometimes pulled one out of the Marx’s merry mayhem (most notably in the awe-inspiring but overly staged productions from A Night at the Opera), Le Million employs its soundtrack brilliantly. Much like the film’s opera “The Bohemians” which is listed as one crafted in three acts, there are three distinct acts to Clair’s work and he not only weaves in music from a natural source as one character sings or plays the piano either in rehearsal or for amusement but also structures his film operatically as well, with the creditors making up a singing version of a Greek chorus and other characters commenting on the action through song. And although as mentioned earlier, it’s cited as a definite Chaplin favorite along with impacting American musical movies, while it has much in common with musicals, one can’t simply stoop to pigeonhole Le Million by labeling it as belonging strictly to the genre, much like calling Jacques Demy’s 1960’s French New Wave classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg a musical is a disservice as well.