Once in a Million

Charles "Buddy"Rogers main claim to fame was as husband to Mary Pickford. He had a limited talent,which stretched quite far. He was never a top star. His co star Mary Brian had already had her time with stardom.

This film rather typifies the attempt by British film producers to break into the American market. Produced by British International Pictures at their overflow studios in Welwyn Garden City. Distributed in America by Gaumont British as part of their failed attempt to get their films shown.

The film is actually well produced with some marvellous art deco sets and dresses. The script and the acting is very mediocre.

Charles 'Buddy' Rogers is a very confident bank clerk in a Paris bank. On a Saturday afternoon,, instead of heading to the race track, he finds himself called into a higher-up's office and told to take a satchel with five million francs and deliver it to another bank. When he arrives, the bank is closed, and he spends the week end losing and recovering the money, while falling in love with dress mannequin Mary Bryan, who has been promoted to a countess by her employer.

It's a fun little movie, and it's fun to watch Rogers being supremely self-confident one moment, then incoherently flustered the next when, for example, the satchel is taken by a large and unfriendly sheep dog. I was initially surprised it was set in Paris, but decided that the rather slapdash manner that the bank handled large sums would never do for a British bank in that era, long before Nick Leeson bankrupted Barings, or the Royal Bank of Scotland argued persuasively that 283 years of experience had left it an unsophisticated investor when it came to derivatives being offered by Goldman Sachs. Rogers and Miss Bryan take the leads in this British production, presumably for an air of American brashness and to sell into the United States. Few other well known players are on view, although Terry-Thomas actually speaks his first two words in a movie.