Windfall, by Robert Andrews (1931)

There have been plenty of examples where a film bears little resemblance to the novel that inspired it, but it’s hard to imagine any fan of the classic Pre-Code ensemble comedy If I Had a Million (1932) picking up a copy of Robert Andrews’s Windfall (1931) and wondering whether anyone in Hollywood had actually read it. If I Had a Million is a shining example of a collaborative film (seven directors and sixteen screenwriters produced a film of eight episodes) that isn’t reduced to a lowest common denominator, and one still remembered for its mostly comic spirit, especially the brief, brilliant, nearly wordless episode directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Charles Laughton:

“The Clerk,” from If I Had a Million.

There is nary a chuckle to be found in the 280 pages of Windfall. Indeed, this is one of the most nihilistic novels I’ve ever read. Its premise is essential the same as If I Had a Million: a dying millionaire, chafing at the sight of his ne’er-do-well relatives hovering outside his bedroom door, decides to pick names — ten in the novel, eight in the film — from a city directory and give each a check for one million dollars. In the film, the millionaire, played by Richard Bennett (father of actresses Constance and Joan), delivers his checks. In the book, he delegates this to his lawyer — and rightly so, as he dies just a few days later. And in the book, there is one string attached to the check: each recipient has to return to the lawyer’s office two years later and report on how his or her life has changed.

This catch is implausible, but a necessary measure for Andrews’s design. The first half of his book takes us up to the moment each character receives the check, the second reveals what happens in the aftermath. Andrews is decidedly Heraclitean in his outlook: he devotes much more space to his back stories, making it clear how much almost all are going to be trapped by the bounds of their character. The gunsel Abe Yeager is bound to become a pathetic little murderer from his years of being picked on and exploited by the man he kills. The prostitute whose only relationship with men is commercial finds she has no basis for any other kind of connection when she no longer needs their money. The poet muses, “With money, I can be the greatest poet in the world. Without worries, I can write what never has been written before.” Instead, he learns that the lack of talent, not the lack of money, is the real reason for his failure as an artist.

Mark David, the lawyer responsible for delivering the checks and collecting the tale from each recipient two years later, shares Andrews’s fatalism. From the beginning, he doesn’t see these gifts as acts of spontaneous generosity but unsound and unsafe, sadistic even. These windfalls are more curses than blessings. Having dispensed the ten checks, the dread of what will follow crushes him: “He did not smile for there was nothing left to smile about, and he began to feel a little cold when he was alone and he was not sure that he wanted to live.”

Of the few dark episodes in If I Had a Million, the grimmest is that in which Gene Raymond plays a convicted murderer who receives his check just moments before being taken to the electric chair. Andrews offers us the same scene, but his telling turns out to be far crueler and bleaker, if that’s possible. It turns out that money can buy you off death row, through the services of a canny lawyer, but it can’t fill a soul hollowed out by fear and hatred: “Accepting death, you die. He did not know this. He knew only that somehow he touched nothing, the shapes were still shadows, nothing stayed in his hands. Not women. Not men. Not things. Not money. Nothing. Nothing stayed. Nothing every stayed… For nothing was real.”

And having lost all his connections, Abe Yeager, the man who escaped the electric chair, becomes — to borrow the line from the Bhagavad Gita made famous by J. Robert Oppenheimer — death, the destroyer of worlds. If I Had a Million ends with the dying millionaire now restored to health by the good food and warm hospitality of Mary Walker, the old ladies’ home resident freed by his check. Windfall has no such happy ending.

Charles Robert Hardy Andrews, to use his full name as given in the bio sketch in Windfall, came up through the ranks as a reporter and editor in Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Chicago, but after selling his first two novels to Hollywood, became a prolific writer of both screenplays and radio serials — at one point in the late 1940s having two films, three serials, and a novel all on the market at once. His son, Colman Andrews, is a successful food writer who helped found Saveur magazine. Robert Andrews died of a heart attack in November 1976 at the age of 73.

---

Windfall, by Robert Andrews
New York: John Day (1931)
also published in a Photoplay edition as If I Had a Million by Grosset & Dunlap (1932).