| Collector's Corner February 2006
 It
Happened One Night
- Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert,
Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale
- Directed by: Frank Capra
- Theatrical release: 1934
- DVD release: 1999
- Video: 4:3, black and white
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
- Released by: Sony Pictures
Right around February 14, everyone becomes romantic and
starts looking for a great love story to watch with a sweetheart. You might pick a weeper,
or a film whose characters overcome the odds to have a happy ending.
Personally, I have a soft spot for screwball romantic
comedies.
Over the years, we’ve seen hundreds of cute movies in
which one of the characters is kind of wacky and the other is an everyman/woman. Garden
State is my favorite recent film in a line that includes There’s Something
About Mary and When Harry Met Sally . . . , all the way back to His Girl Friday, The
Philadelphia Story, and The Thin Man.
But every subgenre as old as this one has a wildly popular prototype, and in this case,
it’s It Happened One Night (1934).
The story is simple. Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is a
rich girl who’s just eloped with aviator King Westley (Jameson Thomas) against the
wishes of her father (Walter Connolly). The father gets her back and takes her to his
yacht, but she escapes by jumping overboard and heads back to Westley. Meanwhile, all
these goings-on have become the top news story in an America battered by the Great
Depression.
Elsewhere, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) has just lost his job
as a reporter for being irascible, drinking on the job, and writing his latest story in
free verse.
Ellie and Peter end up on the same bus headed for New York.
He’s streetwise, poor, and out of work. She’s rich, snappish, and unused to
having to accommodate herself to such low-class digs. She needs help learning the ropes of
buses and trailer camps; he sees her as his ticket back to work.
Of course, we all know where this story is going.
What’s amazing is how it got there in the first place.
Director Frank Capra had been making films since 1922, but hadn’t had much luck
getting a big hit. Then, in 1933, he struck paydirt with Lady for a Day, the
story of Apple Annie. This gave him the clout he needed to move forward on this film
adaptation of a story originally published in Cosmopolitan.
Film historians now believe that Capra had hoped to cast
Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy as the leads in It Happened One Night --
interesting choices, but nowhere near the box-office dynamite of Gable and Colbert. Capra
was making the film for Columbia, but Colbert was signed to Paramount, and Gable was under
contract to MGM. In his highly recommended autobiography, Bring on the Empty Horses,
David Niven, Gable’s best friend at the time, describes things as having been
slightly different: "Gable had been lent by MGM to the despised Harry Cohn and his
struggling company, Columbia, as a punishment for intransigence in turning down too many
mediocre scripts. Claudette Colbert was being similarly chastised for the same reason by
her studio -- Paramount -- but between them they had outsmarted their bosses and persuaded
the brilliant director Frank Capra to direct the picture for which Cohn had borrowed
them."
Whatever the truth, it’s safe to say that neither
Gable nor Colbert was thrilled about the project. Colbert demanded (and got) double her
normal salary: $50,000 for four weeks’ work. Gable was reported to have walked onto
the set and announced, "Let’s get this over with."
Hollywood is full of stories in which an accident becomes
one of cinema’s most famous scenes, and It Happened One Night has one of the
best. The celebrated scene in Dyke’s Auto Camp with "The Walls of Jericho"
(chapters 10-11) came about for two reasons. First, because Colbert refused to undress in
front of the camera, Capra came up with the idea of putting up a blanket. After tensions
had eased a bit (including a bit of cute Colbert cheesecake in the pre-Production Code era
-- note the quiet moments after Gable sings "Who’s afraid of the big bad
wolf") -- they had to figure out how to have Gable do his routine on how a man
undresses. In a joke that runs throughout the film, Gable tries to instruct Colbert in the
simple life -- dunking donuts, hitchhiking, building a haystack hideaway. In this scene he
tries to teach her how a man removes his clothes. The only problem was, he couldn’t
get through all the stripping before the dialogue ran out. Solution: Get rid of his
undershirt, something every man wore in those days. The result shows the power Gable --
and Hollywood -- wielded in 1930s America: US sales of undershirts dropped 30% in the
following year.
The making of the film was rushed, but it looks beautiful.
Capra ensured that Colbert is gorgeous in every shot, but notice especially how he framed
her in night scenes: in chapter 11, when the lights go out and those lovely cheeks and
huge eyes shine through the darkness; and in chapter 17, when she fluffs the hay, the
fence and background light her silhouette like a dreamscaped Rembrandt. With the exception
of her nudeish milk-bath scene as Empress Poppaea in The Sign of the Cross (1932),
this was as sexy as Colbert would ever look.
If some of the other characters seem familiar, there’s
good reason. Most obvious is Danker, played by Alan Hale looking exactly as would his son,
Alan Hale Jr., who became famous as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island. And
would you believe that Bugs Bunny was at least partially hatched from It Happened One
Night? Director-producer Friz Freleng -- who, along with Tex Avery and Chuck Jones,
was responsible for the glorious mayhem at the Warner Bros. cartoon department -- said in
his memoirs that Bugs’s carrot chomping was based on Gable’s in chapter 18. He
also said that King Westley (Jameson Thomas) was an inspiration for Pepe LePew, and that
Ellie’s father (Walter Connelly) inspired Yosemite Sam.
There was good reason for the cartoons to imitate It
Happened One Night, as have so many films since: it works. It worked so well
that this little film, which neither Gable nor Colbert wanted to make, ended up being the
first to win all five major Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Gable), Best Actress
(Colbert), Best Director, and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin). It would be 41 years before
another film -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) -- achieved this feat,
and it has happened only once since, for The Silence of the
Lambs (1991).
Sony Pictures’ DVD is a beautiful remastering of the
film -- about as good a picture as we’ll see until someone makes a high-definition
remastering directly from the original negatives. Capra’s chocolatey tones in the
darker scenes are presented with beautiful fidelity, and the expected film problems are
kept to a minimum. The extras are interesting, and having Frank Capra, Jr. do the
commentary helps assure a degree of authenticity. The trailers are fun, but the included
memorabilia -- posters, lobby cards, ads -- are strictly for obsessives.
But, as with all films fit for "Collector’s
Corner," the extras are icing on the cake. What matters is the film itself, and It
Happened One Night belongs in everyone’s collection. Get a copy, cuddle up, and
be prepared to laugh and remember why you fell in love with that person sitting next to
you.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
