It Happened One Night (1934)

It Happened One Night, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1934, is a charming romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert as two people who meet and fall in love under some strange circumstances. This film is often called one of the earliest screwball comedies. It is certainly the combination of verbal humor and farcical situations that are the source of its success. This was the first movie to win the top five awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay), and it deserved them all. In fact, it received every Oscar for which it was nominated, and that happens very rarely when there are multiple nominations. Only standout films are able to break into that special company, and It Happened One Night was the one that got there first in both cases.

Colbert is Ellie Andrews, a rich young woman who has defied her father and married an aviator. Her father (Walter Connolly) is holding her hostage on his yacht in Miami, and she jumps overboard and swims to shore with plans to escape to New York to be with her new husband, King Westley (Jameson Thomas). In an attempt to avoid the press, she buys a bus ticket for an overnight trip. She meets Gable's Peter Warne, a newspaperman who's a bit down on his luck, while fighting over the last seat on the bus. Gable inevitably discovers her identity and agrees to accompany her to New York if he can have the exclusive rights to her story, thereby getting him back his old newspaper job. She has very little money remaining after her luggage is stolen, and he plans to assist her until he can be reimbursed for his expenses.

What follows is a series of misadventures. Ellie is late returning to the bus one morning and is surprised to find that it has already left despite her telling the driver to wait for her; she's a bit uninformed about the way the "real world" tends to operate. She and Peter wind up spending the night together in an auto camp (an early form of a motel) when another bus gets stuck in the mud. They have to share a third night on a farm sleeping on piles of hay (separate ones, of course). Through all of this, they begin to like each other more and more, but of course, you knew that would happen, didn't you? All I can say is to remember that such a storyline wasn't yet a cliche in 1934.

The performances by Gable and Colbert (as well as the supporting cast) are great. Gable gets several drunk scenes and a few scenes where he's "allowed" to show his temper. When you put this performance next to his work in Mutiny on the Bounty and Gone with the Wind, you realize just how talented an actor Gable truly was, how much of a range he had. Colbert is his equal here, at turns maddeningly naive and then stunningly radiant. It's easy to see why any of the men in the movie fall in love with her. And the wedding dress she wears late in the film is quite the stunner after watching her in the same jacket and skirt for more than an hour.

Two famous scenes in particular are worthy of note. Everyone is already familiar with Peter's failed attempts to hitch a ride from one of the passing cars, only to have Colbert's Ellie raise her skirt and stop the first car that passes by. It still a funny scene, one that earns its laughs just as honestly now as it did then. You see it almost any time that a clip from the movie is show and deservedly so. It captures the gender politics of the film quite astutely. The other famous moment is the "Walls of Jericho" scene in the auto camp when Peter hangs a blanket between the two beds in order to give them a sense of privacy in the small room they share. To get the full effect of that moment, though, you'll have to stay for the end of the movie. However, I'd like to talk about the first time they are together with just a blanket between them. Legend has it that when Gable took off his shirt and revealed that he wasn't wearing an undershirt, sales of men's undershirts plummeted and never quite fully recovered. That's a pretty clear example of the power that the medium of film is capable of displaying.

Director Frank Capra was perhaps the most famous director in Hollywood during the Great Depression. What is admirable about this and other movies he helmed during that time is the attention that he gives to the poor people of the United States. Ellie may be rich, but during her trip to New York, she is surrounded by those who are less fortunate, and she has several instances where she has to realize that wealth does not make her better than other people. Even Peter has to point out to her that she doesn't know how to dunk her donut in coffee properly and that her father never even taught her how to ride piggyback the correct way. There's no overt class warfare in the film, but Capra never lets you forget that you're watching a movie about a member of the idle rich learning how to live like all of those people without money.

I can't say that I truly understand why the film is entitled It Happened One Night. The events happen over several nights. Well, actually, they occur over several weeks. However, that's a relatively small criticism when you've got such a delightful film overall. You'd be hard pressed to find many wrong notes in it, and true to the fashion of the time, you get the happy ending you deserve.

Doctor Doolittle (1967)

The title sequence for Doctor Doolittle, nominated for Best Picture of 1967, is quite charming with its animated animals presenting the names of the filmmakers. An alligator opens its mouth, for example, to reveal the identities of some of the crew members, and three birds "bring" the names of the supporting cast to a perch. After that, however, the charm is pretty much non-existent. This was an expensive musical flop when it opened, and it's often cited as an example of how easily Academy members could be persuaded by vigorous studio campaigns to nominate behemoths like this. Studios benefited from (and still do) Oscar nominations, so Doctor Doolittle received eight of them, shockingly winning two awards (Best Special Effects and Best Original Song for "Talk to the Animals").

The story concerns the good doctor (played by Rex Harrison as if he were exhausted from doing the 40th touring company of My Fair Lady), a veterinarian in 1850s England, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, to be specific. No one understands him and his affection for animals, well, no one human except for his friend Matthew Mugg (Anthony Newley), who delivers fish to women in the town. Certainly, the magistrate, aptly named General Bellowes (played by Peter Bull as if either his last name or the character's last name is a stage direction), doesn't understand why Doolittle would put glasses on a horse so it could see better or try to preserve a fox from the brutality of the hunt after its mate has been slaughtered.

The magistrate's neice, though, Emma Fairfax (Samantha Egger), is another story. Initially, she too despises Doolittle because of the way he treats her uncle. Gradually, of course, she starts to understand the depth of his concern for the animals he treats, and despite a number of initial hints that she and Matthew are falling in love, she instead chooses the (far, far) older man to be her love interest. He, naturally, is oblivious to her charms, even going so far as to sing a song entitled "I Think I Like You," a virtual rehash of the sentiments in "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from Harrison's earlier stage and film success. Why she doesn't stick with Matthew and leave Doolittle to his animals is a mystery the film never bothers to address.

I should mention that before Doolittle romances Emma (who is repeated called "Fred" by Newley's Matthew for reasons that are just too silly), he sings a love song to a seal ("When I Look in Your Eyes"). The seal, you see, needs to be rescued from a circus so that she can be reunited with her husband who's at the North Pole, which hasn't even been discovered yet by mankind. Doolittle knows about the seal's dilemma because he's been raising money by allowing the circus to display a rare animal called a Pushme-Pullyu, a sort of llama with heads at both ends. A friend of his in Tibet has sent him the Pushme-Pullyu because the friend knows that Doolittle wants to go in search of the Great Pink Sea Snail and needs to buy a boat for the journey.

All of this is possible because Doolittle has the ability to understand all kinds of animals, thanks to help of a parrot named Miss Polynesia (or something to that effect). We learn about this from an oddly choreographed number to "Talk to the Animals" (which beat out "The Look of Love" from Casino Royale and "The Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book for the Best Song Oscar--appalling). And, throughout the film, Harrison has to interact with all kinds of animals in order to translate for the rest of us.

Does this sound silly and/or muddled to anyone else? I recall as a child having a Doctor Doolittle coloring book with some of the more familiar scenes in it, such as the seal being garbed in a woman's hat with veil so that she could ride a coach to Bristol and be thrown into the sea. (That act gets Doolittle sentenced to an insane asylum for his claims that he can talk to animals.) And I'm sure that I saw the movie when I was younger as well, but I could barely stand to watch this time.

As an aside, I do think this movie is interesting as one of the earliest defenses of animal protection and animal rights. Doolittle explains (in song, no less) why he is a vegetarian (something like "one shouldn't eat his friends"). And he stands opposed to fox hunting, an English tradition that has been the subject of a great deal of controversy over its cruelty to the foxes, which are hunted for their fur. Those sentiments wouldn't be out of place even today.

There are a couple of other intriguing moments. Richard Attenborough has a small part as Blossom, the head of the circus Doolittle turns to as a money-making venture. His song "I've Never Seen Anything Like It" is quite fun, with all of the circus folks and the animals joining in. And Newley gets to display his trademark vibrato on "After Today," arguably the best song of the score (which, admittedly, isn't saying much). I also particularly enjoyed the appearance of Geoffrey Holder as William Shakespeare X, or "Willie," the leader of Sea Star Island, the floating island Doolittle and his friends travel to in hopes of finding the sea snail. Not only does Holder seem like he's enjoying himself, he's actually quite spectacular looking in an orange wraparound brief-and-robe combo that is accented with shells. That's not a look many men could manage to pull off, but Holder does.

Still, there are far too many false steps in this movie to consider it one of the year's best of 1967 or any other year. The Pushme-Pullyu and the Giant Pink Sea Snail look too fake even to be campy (although they look brilliant compared to the octopus that looks like it stepped out of an Ed Wood film). Most of the music is pretty mundane as well, despite having been penned by Leslie Bricusse. Harrison seems to be having an awful time, and Newley keeps getting saddled with having to ask such odd questions as "What can you hope to get out of a conversation with a goldfish?" Presumably, that dialogue was meant to be funny in 1967, but I doubt it worked. Don't even get me started on the pacing of this film, as it takes almost two-and-a-half hours to unspool. I can't imagine many children sitting still for that long unless a lot more action takes place.

Yes, I've seen the Eddie Murphy remake and at least one of its sequels, but I don't think it's truly a remake so much as a reimagining. The film with Murphy doesn't borrow anything from this film except for Doolittle's ability to talk to and understand animals, and that was probably a good thing.

Oscar Wins: Special Effects and Original Song ("Talk to the Animals")

Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Art Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, Original Music Score, Music Score (Adaptation or Treatment), and Sound