Review of It Happened One Night (1934) by Nick R — 17 Jul 2009

Peter (Clark Gable) is a tough-talking journalist; Ellie (Claudette Colbert) is a "dizzy dame" on the run from home and her father. The two meet while on the road and are forced, reluctantly, to collaborate. He's the salt of the earth, she's a rich kid, and each exploits the other-for him, she means a big newspaper story, for her, he's a way to help her get to New York and a forbidden fiance. In the course of the story, they move from antagonism to love. It could be on of a hundred routine, American romantic comedies of the 1930s or '40s.

But, make no mistake, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night is movie magic. This has something to do with how it conjures an entire milieu: a "people's America" filled with unlikely rogues and soft-hearted citizens, always ready to share a story and a song, or simply exhibit their lovable eccentricities. But the film is also careful to explore exceptions to its basic rule: Ellie's father, Andrews (Walter Connolly), turns out to be a pretty swell chap, just as the talkative bus passenger Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) ends up a weasel.

Capra was expert at cleverly weaving a story from altogether familiar and ordinary motifs: eating, verbal slang ("ah, nuts"), snoring, washing, dressing, and undressing. True to romantic comedy formula, identities are momentarily dissolved whenever a masquerade is necessary or able to be exploited for secret entertainment-although, whenever Peter and Ellie pretend to be husband and wife, more serious possibilities and destinies do suggest themselves...

It Happened One Night is a distant predecessor of today's "trash comedies," such as those by the Farrelly Brothers. Ass jokes abound ("That upon which you sit is mine"); the pretensions and privileges of the wealthy are mercilessly mocked (even their names are funny: King Westley!); Colbert's famous, bare legs stop traffic. And then there is the sexual tension angle: Working patiently through four nights of Peter and Ellie together, the entire film hinges on the symbolism of the "walls of Jericho" finally toppling-the riddling of the blanket that stands, weakly and tremblingly, as the barrier to the consummation of their growing love.

Critics cannot rhapsodize over Capra's powers of montage or mise en scene; style was a functional, conventional business for him. But what he did have was an impeccable sense of script (in both overall structure and small details), and a brilliant rapport with his charismatic actors. Gable and Colbert help to truly equalize this one-upmanship battle of the sexes, diluting that ideological thrust of the script which suggests that proletarian guys should teach spoiled gals a thing or two about real life. In the infectious interplay of these stars-in their mutual willingness to play, to laugh, to be vulnerable, to take a joke as good as they give it-we encounter an ideal that has been well and truly lost in contemporary, mainstream cinema: fighting reciprocity between the sexes.