Oscars Retrospective: It Happened One Night (7th Academy Awards Review)
When looking at 1930s Hollywood, there are several names that pop up a lot when talking about the most influential films of that era. One of the biggest name directors from that time is Frank Capra, an Italian immigrant who was in love with American culture and dedicated his life to bring what he saw as the idealized American life to the country. He’s one of the best directors of the 30s and his most influential and beloved film from that time was easily It Happened One Night (It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) came out in the 1940s, so it doesn’t count).
Considered the archetypical romantic-comedy, It Happened One Night is one of those movies that you may not have heard of, let alone watched, but once I start detailing the plot, it’s going to ring a few bells because everyone emulated this story. While there were romantic-comedies before this, such as The Love Parade (1929) and City Lights (1931), this is where most of the clichés for the genre come from.
A young rich socialite named Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) wants to marry some jerk named King Westley (Jameson Thomas) to stick it to her strict millionaire father (Walter Connolly). After the dad shoots the idea down, Ellie decides to run away from home and make it to her fiancé, one way or another. Both Westley and the father put a reward out for anyone who can find her. So a sarcastic and down-on-his-luck newspaper reporter, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) meets Ellie, sees dollar signs in his eyes and, even better, a way to get his old job back after being fired from the newspaper. The rest of the movie is then about Ellie and Peter’s cross-country trip whilst trying to hide her from other fortune-hunters.
Any good romantic-comedy ultimately comes down to the chemistry between the two leads and, here, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable do play off of each other pretty well. Gable plays the miserable cynic who never has anything go right for him while Colbert plays this spoiled brat who needs to grow up. And, as the movie goes on, you see how the two slowly learn from each other. Warne learns how to be okay with letting people in again and Ellie learns how to become more mature.
Of course, the two argue all the time and talk about how much they can’t stand each other. This is movie talk for indicating that they’re actually deeply in love and will ultimately be a couple by the end of the movie. This leads to the biggest and most mysterious conflict of any rom-com by the end: “Oh, I wonder who the hot girl is going to choose. Will it be the boring rich jerk or the lovable loser who actually treats her like a person?”
It’s actually a little amazing that their chemistry and acting is as good as it is as supposedly neither Colbert nor Gable really wanted to work on the movie. Colbert, especially, seemed to make it her mission to make the shoot a living Hell for Capra as their last picture they made together, For the Love of Mike (1927), was so miserable that she swore that she would never work with him again. After Capra exhausted quite literally every other female star in Hollywood at that time, he was then saddled with Colbert.
My favorite story from this debacle is that during the famous hitchhiking scene (wherein a carrot-chomping Warne tries to teach Ellie how to hitchhike before she shows him up by flashing her leg to a driver to get him to stop) Colbert demanded that Capra had a double perform the leg scene claiming that showing off her leg wouldn’t be “ladylike.” After Capra obliged, Colbert then demanded that she be put back in saying that, “it wasn’t her leg.” The story doesn’t say whether or not she demanded to be pulled back out and the whole afternoon then devolved into a round-robin Abbott and Costello routine so I’m going to assume that it did.
By the way, if you want an idea of just how famous It Happened One Night was in its day, watch the aforementioned hitchhiking scene and pay attention to how Clark Gable talks while eating the carrots.
This scene was one of the prime inspirations for Bugs Bunny and his signature catchphrase, “Eh, what’s up, doc?” In his original short, A Wild Hare (1940), Bugs uttered the line while chewing on a carrot and talking with his mouth full as a deliberate spoof of It Happened One Night, the logic being that there wouldn’t have been anyone in America at the time who didn’t immediately get the reference (it’s kinda like when you watch a movie around the turn of the millennium and see the characters go into slo-mo while wearing a long jacket, you know that it’s a parody of The Matrix (1999)).
It Happened One Night is also notable as one of the last hurrahs of pre-Hays Code Hollywood and getting away with more than a few risqué jokes. For example, the main running gag of the film is how whenever they sleep in the same room, Warne puts up a blanket between their two beds so he doesn’t get any ideas. Plus, there’s the leg bit, the film ends with the two leads having sex and there’s also a scene where Clark Gable takes his shirt off and walks around the motel room bare-chested. (Supposedly, this scene caused the sale of undershirts to plummet in America.)
This is one of those bizarre examples of when a movie becomes so outrageously successful that it actually began to influence the reality surrounding it. Since most of the movie takes place in the backwoods of Great Depression-era America, most Americans felt it hit very close to home as an idealized version of what their lives could be and they loved it even more. A large chunk of the movie takes place on a Greyhound bus and, wouldn’t you know it, Greyhound bus sales skyrocketed afterwards. Just about every rom-com for the next 10 years (and, let’s face it, most of them today) took their chief plot points from this film. And it became the first movie to do a clean sweep of the Oscars, winning all 5 of the major awards: Outstanding Production, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Writing.
Clark Gable especially made out like a bandit after it was all said and done. Before this, he was a minor star who had some mild success with films like A Free Soul (1931). It Happened One Night turned him into a superstar and one of the highest-paid actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. At his peak, he would earn the completely unofficial yet still prestigious title of “King of Hollywood.” A large part of his movies afterwards, in fact, would basically just be rip-offs of It Happened One Night (e.g. Saratoga (1937), Test Pilot (1938) etc.), pairing him with another bratty love interest and jerk antagonist each time.
It Happened One Night was also a pretty big turning point in Frank Capra’s career as well. For those of you who have never seen a Capra movie or don’t understand his style, he’s similar to Ernst Lubitsch in that there’s kind of an air of feel good-ness that permeates through every frame of his films (though Lubitsch’s movies are far more whimsical). Capra, as mentioned above, was an Italian immigrant (though he came to America when he was 5 years old so, honestly, I doubt he even remembered Italy) who grew up in an Italian ghetto and spent the bulk of his post-college years wandering the Western United States as a hobo.
Eventually, he managed to snag a film job by the mercy of a benevolent producer and slowly but surely worked his way up to become one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. This is very much the archetypical American dream that Capra truly believed in and his films tended to reflect that. Most of his movies culminate in characters doing the right thing in the face of oppressive evil and tends to focus on a community aspect arriving to save the protagonist.
What separates his later films from his earlier movies, however, is the sense of effort. Capra always had a very whimsical style, even in his earlier works but let’s compare and contrast the ending of It Happened One Night (and his later works) with the ending of Lady for a Day (1933). While Lady for a Day also ends with a happy note, it has characters who don’t even know the protagonist bailing her out which makes it feel very much like a deus ex machina (which, to be fair, wasn’t uncommon at the time).
In It Happened One Night, there is no great coincidence or angelic benefactors, it’s the main characters making the choice to do the right thing and the people around them being inspired by this goodness to change. This is what allowed Capra to time and again capture the popular sentiment of Great Depression-era America. Despite the colloquialism of calling it a “depression,” it was also a time of hope, especially once Franklin Roosevelt became President. Every unemployed or chronically poor American had a fantasy of achieving the American dream and wishing that the biggest problems in their lives were just romance issues and Hollywood was all too eager to peddle that fantasy. In fact, Hollywood would be one of the very few depression-proof industries, providing escapist entertainment for the masses.
This is where Frank Capra came in and why I think most of his films still hold up even today. His movies portray an America where, if you work hard and be nice to everyone you meet, you’ll eventually get your own happily ever after. This sense of community isn’t as prominent in It Happened One Night as, say, It’s A Wonderful Life, mostly just because of the set-up, but the thumbprints are still there. One of the film’s highlights is when everyone on the Greyhound bus, who are complete strangers to each other, decide to pass the time by singing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” together and having a blast.
I do realize that I’ve spent more time talking about the influence that It Happened One Night had than the actual movie but, to be honest, there’s not a whole lot to talk about with the actual movie. It’s a romantic-comedy, a very definitive one at that, and whether or not you like it depends on whether or not you like romantic-comedies. I’m personally not a very big fan which is why I’m also not really the biggest fan of this movie but it’s still a big cultural milestone in the early 30s Hollywood.
Was it film of the year though?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2
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