Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Robert Riskin, Samual Hopkins Adams
Photography: Joseph Walker
Music: Howard Jackson
Editor: Gene Havlick
Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Jameson Thomas, Arthur Hoyt, Frank Capra
Going on 90 years later, there is lots of trivia to discover about the sprightly It Happened One Night. Men’s undershirt sales reportedly fell after Clark Gable tears off his shirt in one scene and reveals a bare chest. The picture stands as an early marker of screwball comedy, arguably one of the most popular of all time as, among other things, It Happened One Night made a sweep at the Oscars that has only been matched since by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. My favorite piece of trivia is that Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng wrote that the movie influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny. In one scene Clark Gable is eating carrots and talking fast and Roscoe Karns as a minor character on a Greyhound bus has a habit of calling people “Doc.” It may not be much but it’s an honest influence.
I think it's interesting to note that It Happened One Night is considered pre-Code, released just four months before the Hays Code went into effect policing the content of movies. Yes, the picture is somewhat candid about sexuality—candid for 1934, let’s say—but I’m always more shocked by Clark Gable’s roguish brand, before and after the Code. Only James Cagney was a worse role model. Peter Warne (Gable) is a vaguely corrupt, hard-drinking newspaperman who can tell a woman to shut up and make it stick. Warne tells his future father-in-law that his daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert) needs “a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not.” This, of course, seals the deal with Ellie’s father. He's all for Warne now. Next stop, Peter and Ellie with a baby carriage.
Going on 90 years later, there is lots of trivia to discover about the sprightly It Happened One Night. Men’s undershirt sales reportedly fell after Clark Gable tears off his shirt in one scene and reveals a bare chest. The picture stands as an early marker of screwball comedy, arguably one of the most popular of all time as, among other things, It Happened One Night made a sweep at the Oscars that has only been matched since by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. My favorite piece of trivia is that Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng wrote that the movie influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny. In one scene Clark Gable is eating carrots and talking fast and Roscoe Karns as a minor character on a Greyhound bus has a habit of calling people “Doc.” It may not be much but it’s an honest influence.
I think it's interesting to note that It Happened One Night is considered pre-Code, released just four months before the Hays Code went into effect policing the content of movies. Yes, the picture is somewhat candid about sexuality—candid for 1934, let’s say—but I’m always more shocked by Clark Gable’s roguish brand, before and after the Code. Only James Cagney was a worse role model. Peter Warne (Gable) is a vaguely corrupt, hard-drinking newspaperman who can tell a woman to shut up and make it stick. Warne tells his future father-in-law that his daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert) needs “a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not.” This, of course, seals the deal with Ellie’s father. He's all for Warne now. Next stop, Peter and Ellie with a baby carriage.
You can’t complain too much or pretend to be too surprised about such antiquated values—the picture is dated 1934, after all. Better to just take it as it comes. They’re not the only things that seem strangely out of date here. At one point, traveling on Greyhound from Florida to New York, the passengers get up for a singalong session that features “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” It’s a good moment (with some cringing) but nothing like it ever happened on my own Greyhound travels in the ‘70s. Peter and Ellie are on the bus because Ellie is running away from and evading her powerful wealthy magnate father. She wants to elope with a suave fortune-hunter of whom her father disapproves, King Westley by name (Jameson Thomas). Freleng also wrote that King Westley was the model for Pepe Le Pew, the smooth-talking French-accented cartoon skunk, but I can’t see that as clearly. I'm not even so sure about the Bugs Bunny thing.
A regular feature of screwball comedy—not to mention the 1930s in general—is a remarkably keen sense of class consciousness. Newspaperman Warne more or less despises the rich, as do many of the characters in It Happened One Night. It’s a bit reflexive but at least an improvement on the reflexive worship of wealth and celebrity we see around us today. All the hard lessons are for poor little rich girl Ellie to learn. Director Frank Capra with his cheesy world view is only willing to go so far with flouting convention—or maybe that’s the Hollywood moguls he reported to. There’s very little here to call taboo, let alone progressive propaganda. As these things go, My Man Godfrey and Meet John Doe (the latter also by Capra) are much more lacerating and unyielding in their condemnations of the rich. Even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington hits harder at the complacently venal.
It Happened One Night sticks to entertaining, which is probably what it does best. You have to put up with some caveman stuff from Gable & co. The hitchhiking scene is classic screwball, and mostly funny (especially Gable chomping on carrots, now that I know what it led to). Try to remember that hitchhiking was safer in another era than it has been for decades. As for screwball, the picture actually has a surprising amount of zip but inevitably clunks in various places in various ways. That’s going to be hard to avoid for 21st-century sensibilities. But the good stuff is there. One of my enduring favorites in this one is Alan Hale operatically yodeling, “Young people in love are seldom hungry” (though Gable doing the same later in the picture kind of steps on it unfortunately).
It Happened One Night, like most of the talkies between 1930 and 1950, often seems to work best for me like a variation on comfort food. It’s comforting to see Gable and Colbert run their paces. There’s some good chemistry there. Most of the jokes are obvious but they’re often fun to see again. Even before the Hays Code, as we see here, moviemakers instinctively respect the moral guardrails of the US mainstream. Most of those “pre-Code” pictures are a little oversold. It Happened One Night takes chances with things like Gable undressing to his bare chest in the same room with Colbert. But it’s perfectly chaste even with all the antics and that’s comforting too.
A regular feature of screwball comedy—not to mention the 1930s in general—is a remarkably keen sense of class consciousness. Newspaperman Warne more or less despises the rich, as do many of the characters in It Happened One Night. It’s a bit reflexive but at least an improvement on the reflexive worship of wealth and celebrity we see around us today. All the hard lessons are for poor little rich girl Ellie to learn. Director Frank Capra with his cheesy world view is only willing to go so far with flouting convention—or maybe that’s the Hollywood moguls he reported to. There’s very little here to call taboo, let alone progressive propaganda. As these things go, My Man Godfrey and Meet John Doe (the latter also by Capra) are much more lacerating and unyielding in their condemnations of the rich. Even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington hits harder at the complacently venal.
It Happened One Night sticks to entertaining, which is probably what it does best. You have to put up with some caveman stuff from Gable & co. The hitchhiking scene is classic screwball, and mostly funny (especially Gable chomping on carrots, now that I know what it led to). Try to remember that hitchhiking was safer in another era than it has been for decades. As for screwball, the picture actually has a surprising amount of zip but inevitably clunks in various places in various ways. That’s going to be hard to avoid for 21st-century sensibilities. But the good stuff is there. One of my enduring favorites in this one is Alan Hale operatically yodeling, “Young people in love are seldom hungry” (though Gable doing the same later in the picture kind of steps on it unfortunately).
It Happened One Night, like most of the talkies between 1930 and 1950, often seems to work best for me like a variation on comfort food. It’s comforting to see Gable and Colbert run their paces. There’s some good chemistry there. Most of the jokes are obvious but they’re often fun to see again. Even before the Hays Code, as we see here, moviemakers instinctively respect the moral guardrails of the US mainstream. Most of those “pre-Code” pictures are a little oversold. It Happened One Night takes chances with things like Gable undressing to his bare chest in the same room with Colbert. But it’s perfectly chaste even with all the antics and that’s comforting too.
Yeah, all I remembered was Gable and Colbert hitchhiking and shacking up in some campground thingy during the Depression and their wisecracking sexy talk. I overlooked that part where he won her father's approval by promising to sock her once a day. Ouch!
ReplyDeleteMiles is so bad in his Autobio he blames the women he's hit for pushing him, trying to control him too much. He admits to smackng Francis Taylor, who he professes later to be the one great love of his life, and Cicely Tyson, for the excuses mentioned above, but not Betty Davis, although I thought there were allusions to his battery of her in a semi-recent doc I saw ab her.