By Brandie Ashe
It’s a simple enough story: girl meets boy and decides to elope. Girl’s wealthy father takes her away from her new husband and attempts to annul the marriage. Girl escapes her father’s control and tries to make it back to her husband with all manner of detectives on her trail. Girl meets a down-on-his-luck reporter who offers to return her to her husband in exchange for the exclusive rights to her story. Girl and reporter fall in love during one of the craziest road trips ever put to film.
It’s immensely hilarious and zany and clever. It’s appealingly romantic and truly sexy. It helped kick start an entire genre of films. It won a slew of Academy Awards. Eighty years after its release, it remains a favorite of many a movie fan.
Funny to think, then, that neither of its stars even wanted to make the damn picture in the first place.
Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball classic It Happened One Night remains a textbook example of effective romantic comedy. It is truly one of the greatest films ever made. And yet stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert had their qualms about doing the picture at all; Gable was loaned to Columbia to make the film as punishment for defying boss Louis B. Mayer over at MGM, while Colbert only agreed to shoot Night for the $50,000 salary and the promise of a short production time. In fact, upon the conclusion of filming, Colbert reportedly told friends that she had just completed “the worst picture in the world.” But both stars underestimated the appeal of this movie and their performances in it, because both were ultimately awarded Oscars for their work.
Robert Riskin’s screenplay for Night, based on a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, strings together a series of well-crafted gags that continually builds to a satisfying crescendo. An unrelenting farcical tone is set from the opening scenes of Ellie, kidnapped by her own father (Walter Connolly) in the aftermath of her ill-advised elopement, diving from the deck of a yacht and swimming to freedom in Miami. Still, as madcap and improbable as the story is, it is remarkably grounded in reality due in large part to the romance that emerges between the two main characters.
In contrast to the more unbelievable elements of the story, the couple’s attraction is wholly relatable. That’s not to paint them with too rose-colored a brush, however, because while the romance is rather normal (for lack of a better term) in relation to the rest of the plot, it is not a relationship without its challenges. Ellie is childish and difficult, chafing under the thumb of an over-controlling parent and overcompensating by marrying the first gold-digger to show interest, while for his part, Peter is not exactly the romantic hero; when we’re first introduced to him, he’s drunk and belligerent, and his interest in Ellie is initially mercenary in nature, as he wants to make his career off of her story. Peter is at once paternal and romantic with Ellie, condescending as he attempts to school her in the rules of the road (often without success) and all the while fighting his attraction to her. He calls her “brat” repeatedly (a term that becomes less an epithet and more an endearment as the film continues) and upon revealing that he knows exactly who Ellie is, Peter berates her for her attempt to “purchase” his cooperation: “The only way you get anything is to buy it, isn’t it? You’re in a jam and all you can think of is your money.”
But in spite of the differences in their respective stations, and despite their dissimilar lifestyles and attitudes, it doesn’t take too long for Ellie to finally grow up and embrace the idea of an adult relationship, nor for Ellie’s stubbornness and naiveté to work its magic on Peter’s cynical nature.
Or maybe it’s all just due to sex.
Sex—the reality of it, the promise of it, the denial of it—is threaded throughout the film. The idea of the unmarried Peter and Ellie spending the night together in the same room is shocking (at least in the context of 1934), yet Peter’s approach to the issue is utterly nonchalant. He constructs a makeshift “Wall of Jericho” between the twin beds, assuring Ellie that her chastity is sacrosanct; as he points out rather wryly, unlike the biblical Joshua, “I have no trumpet.” (Yet.)
Peter takes advantage of their close proximity to tease Ellie, particularly in the scene in which he waxes rhapsodic about the process of men’s disrobing. As he removes his clothes, one piece at a time, he keeps up a running dialogue as she stands there staring at him. He muses on the “psychology” of undressing, tossing aside his sweater, tie, and shirt, and then, bare-chested, removes his shoes. And as he finally reaches for his belt buckle, proclaiming that it’s “every man for himself,” Ellie finally flees to her side of the “wall.” In return, Ellie does her own teasing, tossing her lingerie over the “wall” (leading Peter, who lies in bed intently watching the “wall’s” movements as Ellie undresses behind it, to ask her to remove it). And later in the famed “hitchhiking” scene, she thinks nothing of lifting her skirt and exposing her shapely leg to hail a car, as a shocked Peter looks on. Each scenario plays off the last, building an almost unbearable sexual tension by the time Ellie’s donned her wedding white to remarry the gold-digging King Westley (Jameson Thomas).
It’s safe to say that the payoff of the film, for both the characters and the audience, is the fulfillment of that early (and frequent) promise of sex. From the first moment Ellie lands on Peter’s lap in the bus (“Next time you drop in, bring your folks,” he cracks), to her innocent snuggling against him in sleep as he looks down at her in bemusement, to their convincing and hilarious playacting as a combative couple to fool the detectives on Ellie’s trail, to the moment in the haystack, when both of them first begin to acknowledge their growing feelings for one another … every moment leads to the final scene, as the Wall of Jericho comes tumbling down to the sounds of a toy trumpet. That point is almost a climax in itself, a moment of triumph and relief that indicates the wayward couple has finally united as one (literally).
Night has been cited as one of the founding pictures of the screwball genre, and indeed, many of the elements that would come to define the form are present here. The movie gently yet pointedly skewers the idleness of the wealthy, using an “everyday,” central character (here, Peter) both to highlight the ridiculousness of the rich, and to school them in the ways of the real world. The romance between Peter and Ellie is fraught with illogical yet perfectly plausible (at least, in context) misunderstandings and misadventures that lead both lovers astray before they find their way to one another again. There are multiple weddings, multiple scuffles, multiple witty insults thrown back and forth, endlessly delayed gratification—a veritable tidal wave of unrelieved and thoroughly enjoyable lunacy.
Simply put, It Happened One Night is a bit of cinematic perfection, an instance of all the right elements combining at just the right time to produce something seriously magical and memorable.
And oh, so very sexy.
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