Monday, July 17th | 7 Movies
Everyone who watches TCM is a winner, of course, but tune in Monday, July 17 and you’ll think you’ve really hit the jackpot. “You May Have Already Won” is an all-night sweepstakes of films in which lady luck—and we use that word (luck, that is, not lady) loosely—upends the lives of its characters.
In the words of Vince Vaughn’s Pete La Fleur in Dodgeball (2004), “Money won is a lot sweeter than money earned.” Untold riches courtesy of kismet are the stuff that dreams are made of. Even those who are resistant to the siren song of lottery come-ons can’t help indulging in “what if?” fantasies with news of a particularly large grand prize. In 2022, for example, someone in California won $2.04 billion. What would we do with such a bonanza? How would it change your life? To what charities might you contribute? What bucket list reveries would you fulfill? What would be your greatest extravagance?
To these individuals, we particularly recommend If I Had a Million (1932), a pre-Code anthology film in which an ailing tycoon, loathe to leave his money to his greedy relatives (“vultures waiting for an old steer to die”), decides instead to give his fortune to strangers picked at random from the city directory so they might have a chance at happiness.
They include a milquetoast china store clerk (Charles Ruggles), a prostitute (Wynne Gibson), a forger on the lam (George Raft), former vaudevillians and tea shop proprietors (W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth), a death row inmate (Gene Raymond) and a rebellious rest home resident (May Robson).
Revenge, redemption and comeuppance ensue in stories that range from the ridiculous to the sublime to the ironically tragic. In perhaps the film’s most celebrated sequence, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, an office drone (Charles Laughton) receives news of his windfall and wordlessly, deliberately ascends to the executive offices where he blows the company president a pent-up raspberry.
Michelle Obama once said that being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. The same can be said for being a lottery or contest winner. In René Clair’s delightful Le Million (1931), Parisian bohemian artist Michel (René Lefèvre) is a debt-shirking, womanizing cad, but when the news gets out that he holds the winning ticket in the Dutch lottery, all is forgiven, at least by the neighborhood tradespeople to whom he owes money (not so much by Béatrice, played by Annabella, his dancer neighbor to whom he is “sort of engaged”).
Le Million gets its sparkle not from the question of whether Michel will win the lottery, but from its riotous race across Paris to find the lost ticket, which was last seen in the pocket of a threadbare jacket that the unwitting Béatrice gives to a stranger.
Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940), is a more upstanding character, with a positive outlook and solid values. An inveterate slogan contestant, he doesn’t let the odds get him down. "Every time I've lost a contest, I've doubled my chances on the next one,” he tells his girlfriend (Ellen Drew). “It's the law of averages.”
His latest entry, for the Maxford House Coffee company, is “If you don’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk.” An ill-conceived practical joke by three co-workers leads Jimmy to believe he has won the $25,000 first prize. His first instinct is to offer to share his wealth with others: his mother (an electric washer and davenport), his girlfriend (a “holy smoke” of an engagement ring) and the neighborhood (toys for the children).
And then there is impoverished farm couple Ma and Pa Kettle in the 1949 series starter directed by Charles Lamont that bears their name. On the verge of eviction from their ramshackle abode, Pa wins a model house in a slogan contest. You can take the Kettles out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the down-home Kettles, who are just as at odds with their new push-button modern contraptions as Jacques Tati is with his sister’s suburban showplace in Mon Oncle (1958).
While we’re on the subject of jackpots, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride hit the ever-lovin’ casting motherlode when they were cast in The Egg and I (1947) as Ma and Pa Kettle, the rustic counterparts to Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert’s fish-out-of-water urbanites looking to make a fresh start as chicken farmers. Main and Kilbride were already beloved prolific characters with more than two decades between them of scene-stealing appearances: (Main in Dead End from 1937 and The Women from 1939, and Kilbride in 1942’s George Washington Slept Here and 1945’s State Fair). But they cracked up audiences in The Egg and I—Main was nominated for an Academy Award—and a nine-film franchise was born. Main starred in all of them, Kilbride in all but two.
A raffle grand prize does not drive George Marshall’s It Started with a Kiss (1959), even if it is “the most magnificent car in either hemisphere.” The engine that propels this romantic comedy is the palpable physical attraction that Glenn Ford’s and Debbie Reynold’s characters have for each other.
Less than 24 hours after their first kiss, Air Force Sergeant Joe Fitzpatrick and dancer Maggie are married and off to Spain where Joe is being posted. Maggie has second thoughts and suggests they live platonically for a month, sending Joe off to thrice-a-day cold showers.
Joe’s raffle prize is an experimental “car of the future” and the most expensive ever built. When it is shipped to Spain, its presence ruffles the feathers of Air Force brass, who believe it sends the wrong message to their foreign hosts about American ostentatiousness. It also attracts the attentions of a matador who develops designs on Maggie.
What do these films - along with Christy Cabanne’s Everybody’s Doing It (1938) and Charles Reisner’s The Winning Ticket (1935) - teach us about the promise and perils of instantly going from rags to riches? Le Million takes a cynical view that is charmingly French. “Money isn’t everything, so beware, so say folks who are intelligent,” sing revelers at a party to celebrate Michel’s good fortune. “I’ll believe what they say when they give all their money away.”
In his 2023 book, “Crooked, but Never Common,” Stuart Klawans notes that of the 10 major films Preston Sturges wrote and directed, six dealt with what can happen when unmerited wealth or fame “suddenly drops onto a person from on high.” Christmas in July, his second film, has a lot to say about the true meaning of success and self-worth. “You’re a success,” Jimmy’s boss counsels him, “if you earn your own living, pay your bills and look the world in the eye.”
