Despite its release in 1934, It Happened One Night never feels dated to me. Sure, most of Frank Capra’s shots lack the hand-cam panning and tilting that we’ve become accustomed to in the last decade or so. And some of the cuts between scenes feel a bit more jumpy than today. At the same time, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are still convincing in their performances – something that can’t be said for many celebrated actors seventy years ago, or today.
Gable is Peter Warne, a tabloid journalist who’s hanging on the last few strands of employment. He drinks a touch too much, but not to belligerence. He’s a bit too smarmy and snarky for his own good, but the dialog is not overdone. Instead, it’s clever, the punch lines are pithy, and they’re self-contained. Today, we’ve accepted tangential comedy and hyperbole as amusement, when, really, it just trains us to laugh by association as if we’re cackling dogs waiting to hear a bell or Lindsay Lohan reference.
Colbert is Ellie Andrews, a wealthy heiress who has married a man, King Westley, whom her father dislikes. There are nods to ethnocentrism here and the early twentieth-century fear of diluting the race – and losing money to Europeans through overseas marriages. Historically, this was so much of a concern that women were forced to renounce citizenship if they chose to marry A foreigner. There is little overt discussion of this in Capra’s film, but it’s conceivable that Mr. Andrews’ whisking away of his daughter concerns his wealth and potential loss of it rather than the character of Westley. Regardless, Colbert pulls off the spoiled innocent without overly emoting or using the volume of her voice to exclaim displeasure.
The same is true for Gable. Both raise their voices when necessary, but the true portrayal of their characters arrives in facial movements, telling eyes, and gentle motions.
Furthermore, the film touches on topics that are relevant today: the line between opinion and fact in journalism, as well as the capitalism engine that resides therein and influences the public perception of “truth.” Nothing is more evident when the thousands of newspapers toward the end of the film declare that “love has conquered all” when Ellie returns to Westley’s arm. The truth is far from the headline, but the public only knows what they are fed. Warne’s editor gets a Cinderella story, but the audience is deceived, and the faces given to our characters are false and fabricated.
It Happened One Night also looks at the economic divide between the rich and the middle class. In 1934, the country was in the middle of the Depression, the cities were functioning in a sense – depending on which essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald you choose to read — but the inner part of the country was suffering and emigrating anywhere they could find work, setting up shanty town, and writing letters to President Roosevelt and his wife, who were able to answer with the same regularity as Santa Claus. It’s in this historical context that we can view Ellie’s indifference to – and potential ignorance of the value of – money. In a kind-hearted, ironic gesture, she shells out Peter’s money to a hungry child, but is unaware of the difficulties she and Werne will face on the road when hungry. Her initial refusal to eat a carrot –uncooked – reinforces her spoiled lifestyle.
What’s also reinforced in this film is the desired prudence of a past generation. Occasionally, you hear the same reaffirmation in the context of commitment rings and chastity vows, but it’s a hitchhiker relegated to the shoulder of our global freeways of thoughts and progression. I’m not sure whether I want this essay to become an advocation or denunciation of the propriety movement, but I will say that It Happened One Night plies the audience with the standard or good manners and even alludes to the commitment mythically inherent in the “one night” that topples the walls of Jericho.
