It Happened One Night (1934)

“That's the way things go: you think you got a great yarn, and something comes along and messes up the finish - and there you are.”

But nothing messed up this one. The granddaddy (and grandma) of American Romantic Comedy still delivers.

Ok, I have to admit…other than the title I knew nothing about this movie. But every so often the Spirits of the Cinema drop a winner from their autogyro. This is one of those.

The film begins on a yacht near Florida, with Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) confined there by her father (Walter Connolly). It seems she eloped with a celebrity aviator, King Westly (Jameson Thomas), who dad isn’t keen on. Since the marriage hasn’t been consummated (it’s unclear how Pop knows that intimate detail, but hey - it’s 1934), he is planning to keep her on the water until the nuptials can be annulled.

Ellie isn’t having any of that and springs from the deck, swims ashore, and decides she is going to travel however she can to New York City to reunite with her new hubby.

Enter Clark Cable.

Gable plays Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter who is on assignment in Florida and needs to get back to New York for reasons of his own. He is quick talking, impressively charming, and a bit of a drunk.

As fate would have it, Peter and Ellie get stuck sharing a seat on a bus. They take an immediate dislike to one another that, over the course of the movie, turns into love. On the way they meet a cast of colorful characters, including Alan Hale (father of Alan Hale Jr, the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island), who picks up the hitchhiking couple after they miss their bus connection, roll (platonically) in the hay, eat a lot of carrots, and take the viewer on a fascinating journey through semi-rural America during the Great Depression.

We won’t spoil it, but the movie climaxes in a scene similar to The Graduate, ‘though with a less ambiguously happy ending.

So if this sounds familiar, it is because It Happened One Night is the Holy Grail - it is the film that essentially launched the romantic comedy genre in Hollywood. If you’ve seen it before, it is because it happened here first. And…few that followed did it as well.

So how is this as a movie?

If you’ve been playing along at home you already know we liked this one.

There are several reasons for that.

First, the production value is startlingly good. It is at least comparable to films made a decade later and could hold its own against most in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. More than a little of that is owed to the director, Frank Capra, who shows the chops he would later put on display in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and countless other classics.

The star power of the main actors is also undeniable. I think I fell in love a little with both Colbert and Gable, who have sizzling chemistry.

Capra also manages to sprinkle in some topical commentary that isn’t always apparent - especially given our distance from the 1930s - but is sharp. It ranges from the obvious (the archetypes they meet along the way) to the subtle (a newspaper with a buried headline about Japan resisting the League of Nations) to the ephemeral (just who is King Westly anyway?).

The last is pretty interesting.

My take is that Westly is a thinly disguised Howard Hughes. Hughes, who made his money in aviation, was starting to get into the film business when this came out and the parallels between the figures are too close to not imagine Capra having a little fun.

Whether Westly was Hughes or just a Hughes-like guy, Capra also uses him to introduce a very Capraesque plot point. As the reunion of Westly and Ellie approaches, Westly announces that he will arrive in grand fashion in his personal autogyro. This - the elite of elite ways to travel - contrasts sharply with Ellie and Peter’s journey by bus and hitchhiking: an experience that connected them with real people. Capra never missed an opportunity to highlight the common American and does just that here…‘though you may miss it if you blink.

But don’t blink. Instead, watch It Happened One Night HERE.

Five out of Five Cats.

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