“Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined.”
The first of three films to win all five major Academy Awards (followed by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night stars Claudette Colbert as a spoiled heiress with an oppressive father (Walter Connolly) who takes to the streets to escape the man’s clutches. Though she tries her best to blend in with the common folk, a roguish, reckless reporter (Clark Gable) soon recognizes her, figures out her game, and elects to help her covertly travel to New York to meet her gold-digging husband (Jameson Thomas), hoping that along the way he’ll gather material for a career-making story. Instead, inevitably, the unlikely partners fall in love.
Hitting theaters only a few months before the Motion Picture Production Code went into full effect, the film is considerably more risqué than one might expect—an unmarried couple undressing in the same room, a flash of bare leg to flag down a hitchhiker, lustful leers, transparent innuendo. I particularly like the Walls of Jericho bit, which sees a blanket hung on a clothesline between the odd couple’s separate beds, a weak barrier warding off the consummation of their relationship. But Capra also smartly uses his Depression era backdrop to suggest that his leads are always hungry and thirsty (they say Gable’s predilection for munching carrots inspired the creators of Bugs Bunny)—a pretty clear metaphor. Further, cleverly, he uses very deliberate cinematography to obscure the film’s most prurient moments, indicating a path forward for hot-blooded filmmakers looking for ways to have their cake and eat it too.
Even so, as a forerunner of the screwball comedy genre that would reach its manic zenith in films like Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday and George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, the true pleasure of Capra’s film lies not in its pre-Code elements but in its banter—the clever back-and-forth between Colbert and Gable as they haplessly excurse through various hardscrabble communities, giving the spoiled socialite a taste of low class living.
Most delightful is a sequence where police detectives barge into the cabin the pair have rented for the night, forcing them to improvise an argument as if they’ve been married for years and harbor deep-seated resentment toward one another. Second most delightful is an impromptu performance of ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ while onboard a Greyhound bus. It’s communal entertainment that grows so joyful and inclusive that the driver loses control of the vehicle when he tries to applaud. Sprinkled among these standouts are a generous handful of grace notes that conjure a colorful milieu full of downtrodden citizens just waiting to reveal their eccentricities, whether they be kind-hearted souls or conniving scoundrels.
Historical accounts suggest that few involved in the film’s making really believed it would amount to anything—a downright baffling notion when set against its enduring legacy of pure movie magic.