It Happened One Night

Frank Capra’s popularist sensibility deepens the screwball humor in “It Happened One Night” (1934) and imparts a lyrical tone to this famous comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Capra’s touch is evident in the Walker Evans’ locations, the shabby motor-courts and bus stations, the hobos on the train that Gable salutes near the end of the film. Carrying Colbert across a romantically sparkling, moon-lit river, the two characters argue about piggyback rides and Gable’s newspaperman declares: “You show me Abraham Lincoln and I’ll show you a great piggybacker of all time” -- a line that seems to prefigure Capra’s political comedies made in the latter part of the thirties. The film, the story of a runaway heiress who falls in love with a newspaper man covering her flight across the country, is gratuitously beautiful. Many of the scenes resemble Murnau or Mizoguchi -- a sexually charged scene inside a cabin a motor-court is shot in in dense chiaroscuro, the beautiful faces of the movie stars sculpted in light and shadow, features softened by rain pouring down windows, Colbert’s eyes scintillant and glowing in the gloom of the small, modest cabin. Gable’s encounter with a blackmailer in the woods is beautifully rim-lit, the figures outlined against trees and shrubs in the dark with mist rising across the swamp where the bus that they have just left is stuck in mud. The Depression-era details are vivid -- a woman faints from hunger on the bus, and, during a sing-a-long, various character-actors rise to sing, and act out the verses of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” -- when the bus-driver joins in the chorus a little too enthusiastically he ends up crashing the rickety vehicle. A pan across the crowded yards of a motor court early in the morning, ending on a group of women waiting for a public shower, has some of the Brueghel-like vibrancy and peasant vitality of Mizoguchi’s scenes of small medieval villages in rural Japan. Capra can’t bring himself to he critical of any of his characters -- even the rich man, a Monopoly-board tycoon, turns out to have a heart of gold. It’s impossible not to like this picture and, eighty years after it was make, the movie has lost none of its charm.