It Happened One Night (1934)

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It Happened One Night (1934) – F. Capra

It seems to me that Frank Capra is one of those filmmakers that you first encounter as a child or youth (from It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946, to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, and maybe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), when his “Capra-Corn”, full of sentimentality and simple populist politics, can have its biggest impact.  But there’s no denying the pleasures available to adult viewers in a film like It Happened One Night (1934), winner of 5 Oscars for Capra, screenwriter Robert Riskin, and stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, not to mention Best Picture.  Gable is at his charismatic best as the no-nonsense straight-talking but principled reporter who gets drunk, gets fired, and then stumbles onto the story of a lifetime: heiress Colbert has run away from her over-protective banker father (Walter Connolly) to elope with an older aviator, acknowledged by all to be a fraud. When her bag is stolen, bystander Gable helps her to navigate the journey from Miami to New York to meet her fiancé (by night bus and other modes of transport), teaches her about hitch-hiking (the thumb!), piggy-back rides, and donut-dunking – and also falls in love with her. There are some highly-charged erotic moments when the couple are separated by the Walls of Jericho (a blanket suspended between two twin beds). When they aren’t fighting (which is most of the time), you can see the care developing between them.  Anyway, it’s a comedy with the kind of plot that puts all sorts of obstacles in the way of young love until we reach the requisite happy ending. They don’t make them like this anymore.