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.
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