Have you ever wondered what would happen if you take a Funtime musical film and removed all the music.
Well look no further because 'Fifty million Frenchmen' is just such a film.
It was made with the whole idea that all of the more mundane moments would be picked up with Jaunty little show tunes and singing set pieces to help move the plot along.
But for some weird reason the people who made this film decided to remove their musical cues.
Something to do with musicals not being popular at the time. I'm not entirely sure how true that is or why that would be true.
It's 1930, having sound in your films is a fairly new thing. So you think a bunch of people would want to jump on top of musicals.
this is all assuming that anything I've heard about this movie is true. There's a good chance that it's all just made up by other people or misunderstood for something else. But there is one thing that's fundamentally true. This film is cut down and the only version of it it seems to survive is the Americanised one. That is the one without music. Which is a real shame.
This movie has so much working against it. And to not have the musical cues just makes it worse.
The story revolves around this guy who's interested in this American Girl that you laid eyes on. It doesn't Express that he has any real emotions to her besides just thinking that she's attractive.
And she doesn't give a rat's ass about him one way or the other either.
There's even a little scheme that goes on where he makes a bet with his friends that he can hook up with this woman.
They tell him that he's not allowed to use any of his money. Which makes everything even more difficult for him because the girl he's interested in only seems to have an interest for guys with money.
This all leads to one big problem. Everyone feels incredibly shallow.
On top of all of that the general story is incredibly formulaic.
It's one of those situational comedies where every little thing that could go wrong does go wrong for our main character as he does everything in his power to win this girl's heart over.
But it's done in the most stupid of fashions.
Like the guy chases down the girl's taxi cab only to get a card from her as she decides to give the guy one possible chance.
Now the guy has to pay for the taxi cab after she leaves and because he doesn't have any money he gives the taxi driver his old coat. Forgetting that he put the card in there only a few minutes ago. It's that kind of stupid scenario. We're dumb things only happen because our character loses all sense of perspective and just does something incredibly dumb on the Fly.
And I'm sorry but if I was this girl there's no way in hell I'd give that guy a card to begin with. He jumped into your cab after you told him repeatedly that you weren't interested in him. I think he was a complete Looney wanted to do me harm.
I didn't care for this movie one bit. They had a possibility for a good film. They could have worked on the character interactions maybe made our lead roles a bit more interesting cut down the stupid subplot involving these dumb American detective guys who follow them around for slapstick reasons. I just have a good old romantic comedy. If it was me I would have kept everything in that one massive bar and just had the whole scenario base there.
the movies too busy wanting to give you low grade, D. It would rather you laugh at the silly French accent or respond to the Americans weird sounding laughter than work on anything resembling thoughtful comedy.
I'd say don't bother watching it but it's almost impossible to find this film now anyways. The one I was watching got taken off the video site halfway through watching. I guess the film wasn't in the public domain after all.
Oh well, it's not a big loss.
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