Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, since that's the month with Halloween and Lugosi is known for a bunch of horror pictures going back to at least Dracula. Early in his career, he made some movies that can't be classified as horror by any stretch of the imagination. One such film that TCM ran has Lugosi in a small role: Fifty Million Frenchmen.
Lugosi isn't the star here, as I implied above. Instead, top billing goes to a pair of comedians called Olsen and Johnson, although they're really more supporting characters. The nominal male lead is an actor named William Gaxton, playing an American named Jack Forbes. As the movie opens, he's on a boat about to dock at Le Havre, the disembarcation point for transatlantic liners going to France, where he meets Lu Lu Carroll (Claudia Dell) and immediately falls in love with her because that's how dumb Americans abroad act.
All of the rich Americans stay at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, which is where we meet Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. They're playing a pair of detectives -- or at least that's their claim -- named Simon Johanssen and Peter Swanson respectively. Also at the hotel is Michael Cummins (John Halliday), who happens to be a friend of Jack's. They get to talking about women, and the end result is that Michael bets Jack that he can't get Lu Lu to become engaged to him in two weeks, with the caveat that he's not allowed to use his father's letter of credit. For no good reason other than to advance the plot, such as it is, Jack takes the bet.
Simon and Peter have run up a large bar tab that they can't pay. Just after making the bet with Jack, Michael runs into Simon and Peter. He finds out that they really are detectives, so he offers them a job. They're supposed to make certain not only that Jack holds to the terms of the bet about not borrowing money, but also if they have any chances to do whatever they can to keep Jack from actually getting engaged to Lu Lu.
Complicating matters is the presence of another American woman, Violet (Helen Broderick). She meets Michael when he's working as a tour guide to try to earn money on his own to satisfy the bet, and is going to serve as "the other woman" when the plot requires it to make it uncertain whether Jack is going to wind up with Lu Lu or not. The plot has Jack and the rest go through a number of scenes, such as a society party where the Bela Lugosi character is hired to do a magic show. There's also the horse races, before we get to the comedic finale.
The plot to Fifty Million Frenchmen is a mess, and the movie is decidedly not helped by the fact that Olsen and Johnson are decidedly unfunny. Maybe their brand of vaudeville humor was funny back in the early 1930s, but their antics haven't stood the test of time. The movie is based on a Cole Porter musical, only all the songs have been removed. (Wikipedia says the songs were there originally, but were removed because by the time the movie was released, musicals were less popular.) In any case, the movie just didn't work for me.
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