It Happened One Night

This Depression road movie throws together a spoilt heiress on the run and a jobless reporter hoping for a big story to create one of the all-time greatest romantic comedies. It's one of only three films to sweep all 5 major Oscars at the Academy Awards (Best Film, Screenplay, Actor, Actress and Director) and is the film that legitimised director Frank Capra as one of the first Hollywood kings of the talkies.

It Happened One Night is the tale of an unlikely romance between two very different people. Claudette Colbert is the rebellious wayward (and stubborn) daughter of a stuffed-shirt family of inherited wealth. She absconds from her father when he frowns upon her choice of a husband, and whilst traveling incognito across the country she meets Clark Gable, a working class journalists who falls for Colbert despite his cynical misgivings about her background. They strike a deal - Gable will pose as Colbert's husband, offering her protection and cover, and in return he will get the scoop on her story.

It Happened One Night is the ultimate Depression-era comedy. Only four years earlier America had experienced the devastating Wall Street crash, which led to a radical restructuring of American values. During the 1930s the American conscience was very much in a state of flux... the rich and the privileged were frowned upon by the larger masses (many of whom were undergoing financial hardships) due to the widening economic gap between them. Colbert's naive but spoilt heiress embodies this, whereas Gable represents a new man for a new era... a man who cannot be bought, an ideal that had some resonance with Depression-era audiences looking for a new moral compass in an economically bereft landscape. Gable's sarcasm and practicality is very much a voice for the American public of the time, and hence this film struch a big chord with audiences in the mid-1930s. They got a kick out of seeing Colbert and her character's sense of entitlement taken down a peg or two.

The modern romantic comedy genre owes everything it has to this film too. All the cliches and hallmarks of the genre (and the way they all get put together) can be traced to this film - the misunderstandings, crossed wires, the love-hate relationship, tall tales and breezy banter. Gable's central dilemma is that he will have to choose between true love and his career. The film even has the 11th hour ending where one character has to run to get to the other and tell them they love them before it's all too late! This climax has pretty much become the template for all romantic comedies each. One thing that I did find odd however is that we don't actually get to see Gable and Colbert's reconciliation - instead we get some snappy visual shorthand from Capra that lets us know that everything is absolutely peachy (a longshot of a motel room - the type of locale we've seen the inside of for the bulk of the film's duration suddenly becomes something we only get to see from the outside now that the relationship between the protagonists has changed). It's fine in itself, and there's a logic to it, but it seems strange for a film of any era to not let it's two stars have a big final scene together.

Like all Capra films, It Happened One Night bounces along at a rollicking pace whilst extolling the virtues of enjoying life and celebrating a kinship with one's fellow strangers as the most important thing of all. Colbert in particular stands out, her impeccable sense of comic timing cracks through the facile inetractions of early 1930s films with a knowing sense of humour that should connect with more modern audiences.

DIRECTOR: Frank Capra
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Robert Riskin, based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
KEY ACTORS: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Jameson Thomas

RELATED TEXTS:
- Night Bus, a fictional magazine story by journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams. I'm sensing that Gable's character might've be slightly autobiographical.
- The other winners of the 'big' 5 Oscars were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.
- This film was remade as a musical, You Can't Run Away From It, in the 1950s.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert) and Best Screenplay.
Venice Film Festival - nominated Best Film.