It Happened One Night (1934) - film review

Wealthy financier Alexander Andrews is so offended by his daughter Ellie’s decision to marry the playboy King Westley that he holds her prisoner on his yacht whilst he arranges an annulment.  Ellie isn’t easily cowed – she dives overboard, swims ashore and buys a ticket for the night bus from Miami to New York.  On the same bus is Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter who has just been fired.  Warne recognises Ellie as the missing heiress, but offers to chaperone her to her husband in New York if he can write a newspaper article that will win back his job.  On the way, Ellie loses her luggage and her money and begins to depend more and more on her unexpected knight errant...

It began as the film no one wanted to make and ended as one of Hollywood’s biggest success stories.   It Happened One Night is one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, as enjoyable today as it was when it was first released in 1934.  The first of the great screwball comedies, this was the film that firmly established the reputations of director Frank Capra and actors Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.  And yet it came so close to never seeing the light of day.

MGM had already turned down the idea of adapting Samuel Hopkins Adams’s short story “Night Bus” (first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1933) when rival company Colombia committed itself to making the film.  At the time, Colombia was the poor relation of Hollywood, with little clout and even less money.  Without Frank Capra’s enthusiasm, the film would never have got off the ground.  

Unfortunately, no one seemed interested in playing the lead roles.  Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy were Capra’s preferred choice, but they declined the offer.  In the end, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer agreed to lend his counterpart at Colombia, Arthur Cohn, an up-and-coming star for the male lead – Clark Gable.  It wasn’t so much an act of kindness on the part of Mayer as an attempt to punish an actor who was making a nuisance of himself by asking for exorbitant pay rises and turning down films on a whim.  Finding a female lead was equally problematic, and the part went to the relatively unknown Claudette Colbert.   Both Gable and Colbert felt short-changed and loathed the screenplay.  Before her Oscar nomination, Colbert was describing the film as the worst that had ever been made.

Colombia’s anxieties over the film seemed to be borne out when its first few weeks at the box office showed only modest sales.  Then, out of the blue, the film became a runaway success, ending as one of the most popular films of the year.   On top of that, it was nominated for and won an unprecedented tally of five Academy Awards, a feat that wasn’t matched until 1975 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.   The film took awards in all of the main categories – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Gable), Best Actress (Colbert) and Best Adaptation.    Not bad going for a film that no one wanted to make.   This success transformed the fortunes of Colombia overnight.   The film inspired two musical remakes: Eve Knew Her Apples (1945) and You Can’t Run Away From It (1956).

It Happened One Night is a low-key work in comparison with Capra’s subsequent films, but what it lacks in Hollywood glitz it more than makes up for in style and fun.  It is certainly one of Capra’s lighter films, having something of the character of a Lubitsch comedy with its scintillating dialogue and effortless humour.  The modest production values are effectively masked by some atmospheric and beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography, which makes this one of Capra’s most alluring and romantic films.

The film was made during the Great Depression and this clearly influences the tone of the piece, which has some surprisingly bleak moments.   How to exist on virtually no money is one of the film’s main themes, as is solidarity in the face of adversity.  The anti-capitalist messages that lie at the heart of this film are subtle but inescapable – the moral being that money can buy comfort but it can never buy real happiness.  

One of the film’s strengths is the edgy rapport between its two stars - Colbert’s unflappable smoothness and dignified air of superiority plays well against Gable’s mercurial swings between grouchiness and insouciance.  It’s a shame the two actors appeared together in only one other film, the disappointing Boom Town (1940), directed by Jack Conway, because they make a very effective comedy double act.

It Happened One Night has many famous scenes, but perhaps the most memorable is the hilarious hitchhiking scene, which has been emulated many times since but never bettered.  "The limb is mightier than the thumb", Colbert quips after landing a lift by flaunting a nice bit of leg.  Another well-remembered scene is the one where Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal a well-proportioned bare chest – it is reported that sales of vests in the United States took a sharp decline afterwards.

© James Travers 2008

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