How to Watch a Hollywood Legend: On It Happened One Night
This is the hundred-and-seventy-seventh in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my second favorite 1934 film, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, directed by Frank Capra.
When a film has the reputation of one like IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, it may be difficult to take in the work’s merits alone. It’s essentially impossible to push away the knowledge, if you already have it of course, that it “started the rom com and screwball comedy genres,” “swept the Oscars” with its five wins of all major categories (only since replicated by ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST [1975] and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS [1991]), and benefited from a slow-burning populist success that elevated the already considerable fame and talents of its director Frank Capra and stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. You don’t have to be totally embedded in classic film “discourse” to recall these facts or even the various larger-than-life anecdotes about IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’s production (no one actually wanted to be in the thing) and impact (undershirt sales plummeted upon the country seeing Gable shirtless). Rather than retread the various insights and arguments about the film (at least entirely), I thought I’d take the opportunity to dissect how one could approach watching a legend of this caliber, in this case a massive installment in the “canon” tied up in so many Hollywood legends that essentially deserves its revered place, in three easy steps. I don’t presume to say that most of those reading this haven’t seen the film, and in fact I won’t entirely shy away from “spoilers,” but this is a template that could be applied to many other works. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is going to catch on, is what I’m saying.
Step 1: Rewatch
As someone who rarely rewatches films, or if I do the viewings are many years apart, this advice is some I’d be predisposed not to take myself. But there’s just no way that the first watch of a film as lauded as IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT can totally satisfy expectations, even if you like it (as I still very much did at once). If some of the jokes or moments are already known to you, their place in the film feels more like trivia (“hey, it’s that part!”). The sense that there should be some incredible revelation may also elude you, as it did for me.
To that end, I still have problems with IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’s ending. There is no ultimate reunion depicted between Gable and Colbert’s lovers after the “belly of the whale” moment that, by sheer luck and circumstance, shatters their closeness just as it was about to be consummated, in one sense or another. But there’s also something quite daring and impactful in Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin’s decision to call back to the recurring “walls of Jericho” motif, which has maintained propriety for the two unmarried travelers in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’s motel-esque auto camps. In the film’s final moment, a trumpet is sounded and the sheet on a cord that has separated them in previous scenes comes down, the audience never catching a glimpse of Gable or Colbert in the process. In fact, we never even see them kiss at any point of the film! But the significance of blasting noise, even ignoring the potentially phallic interpretation of the instrument, implies an eroticism and sexuality that could only be committed in the Pre-Code era; IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT was released at just the end of it.
Step 2: Take in the film’s (literally) dated terms
This header works in two ways. First and much more easily forgiven, the parlance of old Hollywood films, especially in that wise-cracking and innuendo-laden Pre-Code era, can go right over our modern heads. But there are often memetic references embedded in certain lines that would have made great comic sense to audiences of the day. You need not know or research every scrap of a joke to appreciate the cadence and delivery of Gable and Colbert, especially in their most sardonic and sarcastic moments. You can work with context clues; I believe in you.
Secondly, and more difficult to integrate, are the elements we may now term as “problematic.” IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is actually much more easily enjoyed than many of its peers, especially in the screwball genre, due to its lack of outrageous racial caricatures and an even relatively tamed misogyny. There are glimpses of the latter, though. Towards the end of the film, Gable mentions (to her father no less!) that Colbert is the kind of woman who deserves a hit now or then to keep her in line. It’s part of a furious tirade after he believes Colbert has betrayed their budding love. When her father, played by the great character actor Walter Connolly, asks for a third and final time if Gable loves her, he answers: “Yes! But don’t hold that against me…” This moment portrays the vulnerability of Gable, an escalation of the smaller moments of this sort he’s shown throughout IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. He resorts to an implied violence he hasn’t quite had to bring out from within his masculinity so far. It’s not that the film, Capra, Riskin, or even Gable’s character himself believe that “corporal punishment” is necessary; it’s that Gable has no idea what to do with his frustrated love.
There are much less violent tendencies throughout IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT that could still be viewed as patronizing. Gable mansplains many times to Colbert how to do things. His character, Peter Warne, is a working-class reporter with a spontaneous streak, and Colbert’s, Ellen Andrews, is a spoiled heiress who flees her circumstances, yearning to break free. Therefore, she doesn’t know how men undress, how to dunk a donut, how to piggyback, or how to hitchhike. The joke is on Peter when Ellen’s gams finally stop a car after his thumbs haven’t done the trick, which drives home the purpose of the recurring bit of subjects on which the reporter “could write a book.” Both of these individuals can learn from each other, and while the bullying of Ellen could read as a misogynist slander of ineptitude, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT really establishes these differences in terms of class rather than gender, being made right in the middle of the Great Depression as it was.
Step 3: Fall prey to the artifice
Modern audiences are too hung up on realism. I’ve encountered many a viewer who, when watching a film like IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (even one from more recent years), remark “that wouldn’t happen like that,” or something along those lines. The point of a story worth committing to film, or literature, or song, is that it’s exceptional. In Hollywood cinema of this period, that applies to such overrated things as “plot.” You need not dispose of the critical thinking part of your brain to also suspend your disbelief and accept the embedded truth of a romance that starts antagonistic and blossoms into beauty in about 100 minutes.
This artifice also applies to the very look of the thing. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT actually employs more “realism” than many Hollywood films of its era. Due to a contracted shooting schedule (apparently to get Colbert out the door to her vacation), Capra and Co. had to rely on outdoor locations and quickly built sets. It’s convincing in one sense, yes, but especially as implemented by cinematographer Joseph Walker, the Romanticism of Capra and Old Hollywood’s instincts are displayed through gorgeous light and shadow. Phillip Lopate, in conversation with Molly Haskell for the Criterion Collection release of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, expresses that the film’s beauty lies in its existence as a poetic nocturne. This reading is spot-on. The film, based on a 1933 short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams called “Night Bus,” expresses much of its milieu of an America becoming increasingly mobile even as it becomes sedate in poverty in the relative dark, but spotlighted with heavenly arcs. Few films have made nighttime roadside diners, beds made of piled hay, or sparkling rivers look more appealing than IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT does.
It’s probably dangerous to tell anyone how to consume any media, but I hope the advice set forth here (to risk exposing my tongue-in-cheek rhetorical strategies) makes clear that I had to wrestle with these very instincts myself in watching IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. I am not the antagonistic sort who walks into a first-time viewing of a film like, say, CITIZEN KANE (1941) ready to tear it to pieces in response to the decades of conventional wisdom saying it’s great. But the reality is that the “canon” can produce many disappointments, hence the very necessary conversations about the legitimacy of such a concept (especially when formed by white male filmmakers and critics) and in spite of my own semi-accidental attempt to build one in this essay series.
But filmgoing is an intensely personal journey, and if you don’t like IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, I won’t be offended. For me, it mostly delivers a great experience to match and in some ways exceed my heightened expectations. Capra and his collaborators created a truly stirring film that feels simultaneously spontaneous in its development of a love and intentionally crafted in its exquisite display of dialogue and cinematography. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is a Hollywood legend that deserves its status and the fact that generation after generation has turned to it as a sort of “comfort food” movie, in spite of its deeply felt integration of Depression-era suffering but also because of the human triumph over such, means that others like me have employed some form of this how-to method in enjoying it, however unconsciously.
