It Happened One Night (1934)

This classic is about a spoiled brat, Claudette Colbert, who gets married behind her father's back.  He wants it annulled and she is madly in love.  So, she runs away from her home in Miami to her husband in New York.  She is aided by Clark Gable, a reporter looking for a story disguised as a good samaritan. 

Well ladies and gents, this here is the introduction of the first romantic comedy.  I really liked this movie.  It was your basic girl meets guy.  Girl and guy hate each other.  Girl and guy get closer by working together.  Girl and guy still pretend to hate each other.  And then guy finally sees girl naked.  Ya know, the basics.  It's basically the original The Sure Thing.  I am a sucker for John Cusack.  But basically Cusack is the lead, Colbert.  Colbert is trying to make it back to her "sure thing" but falls in love with her comrade along the way.  The supporting characters are very funny, especially the guy who sings every response.  However, Gable and Colbert are fantastic together, even though they both could care less for the film.  The most famous scene in the movie is when Gable tries to teach Colbert how to flag down a car and fails.  Colbert then flags a car down by flashing a bit of leg, basically porn for film in the 1930's. 

It's funny to think that the romantic comedy, now one of the most pedestrian and typical of film genres, was so ahead of it's time in 1934 that some of the cast and crew reportedly thought this movie was going to be awful. Audiences of the time knew better and this film became one of the only films to sweep every Oscar it was nominated for, deservedly so because it's often laugh-out-loud funny. Katie nails the formula pretty well in her review, although this movie is likely not as suggestive or risqué as she might lead you to believe.  A curtain (the Wall of Jericho, colorfully dubbed by Gable) separates the stars when they are sharing a room and (scandal!) changing clothes in the same room... until the very end, but you will have to watch the film to see what I mean. Clark Gable, who will go on to star in many Best Picture winners, gives a wonderfully magnetic pre-Orson Welles performance that brings this film back to the acting standard set by Grand Hotel. Sure, you will be able to guess how the picture turns out but you will have many unexpected laughs along the way, and this combined with the confident direction of the great Frank Capra makes this film a winner. While perhaps not as perfect an example of the genre as The Philadelphia Story or the much-later Sleepless in Seattle, It Happened One Night earns it's place as one of the earliest and finest of the Best Picture winners.


According to William L. Shirer's "Berlin Diary", It Happened One Night was one of Adolf Hitler's favorites movies. 

"Oh, I see, young people in love are never hungry. "