If I Had a Million

I had a post on a different movie scheduled to go up today, when I noticed that the anthology movie If I Had a Million was on the TCM schedule overnight tonight, or the early hours of Tuesday (July 18) at 2:15 AM. Note that this is still late Monday evening on the west coast. A search of the blog, however, claims that while I used the movie once for a Thursday Movie Picks, I've never actually done a full-length post on it. So, since the movie is definitely worth a watch, today's the day to do a more-or-less full-length review.

I say "more or less" because, this being an anthology, the most natural thing to do is to have a one- or two-sentence synopsis of each segment. The framing story involves a wealthy man, John Glidden (Richard Bennett), who is on his deathbed. He's worth at least eight figures, which is a lot today but a huge sum back in 1932, and he's got a lot of grasping relatives he doesn't like. So he decides to give away a million bucks to several random strangers before he dies, by picking names out of the phone book. This leads to eight segments:

• Henry Peabody (Charlie Ruggles) works in a china shop and has a boss he doesn't like, so you can probably guess what he does with his million.
• Violet (Wynne Gibson) is a prostitute working at a bar on the docks. When she gets her million, she makes her way uptown, and....
• Eddie Jackson (George Raft) is a notorious forger who, having gotten a check from Glidden, realizes that no bank will accept it because they'll naturally believe it's a forgery.
• Emily La Rue (Alison Skipworth) is continuously vexed by bad drivers, so her husband Rollo (W.C. Fields) uses the money to buy cars and....
• Gene Raymond plays John Wallace, who is on death row and thinks the million dollars can buy him a new defense so he can be exonerated and go back to his wife Mary (Frances Dee).
• In what is probably the weakest segment, and surprising considering the star, Charles Laughton plays an office clerk who sees the million as what we would today call "fuck you" money.
• Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper) is a marine in the stockade. He thinks the check is an April Fools joke, which has consequences when he gets out of the stockade.
• Finally, Mary Walker (May Robson) is a resident of an old folks' home where the administrators basically want to warehouse the residents until they die. Mary, however, wants the residents to be able to live, and now that she's got a million, she may be able to make it happen.

As with any anthology movie, different people are going to have different segments that they think are the best, and others which they think are weak. For me, the Wynne Gibson segment is surprisingly profound. Fields and Skipworth unsurprisingly do well with what is little more than zany comedy, but of the sort that was tailor-made for them. Laughton gets a shocking weak script to work with, although it's realistic because in real life all of us have people we'd like to be able to tell off, and having $1 million in 1932 dollars would certainly give one the money to do it.

If you haven't seen If I Had a Million before, by all means make it a point to watch or record this TCM airing. It doesn't show up all that often.