It Happened One Night - The Movie

Introduction

It Happened One Night revolutionized romantic comedy and men's underwear. America was captivated by its feisty heroine and the film killed the sales of men's undershirts when Gable took off his shirt to reveal an appealingly bare chest. It is full of classic scenes that have been imitated in subsequent films and television shows. Probably the most famous scene in the movie is the one in which, on their travels, Elly and Peter are forced to share a one-room motel cabin overnight and Peter, ever resourceful, hangs a blanket on a some rope to provide the debutante the privacy and respectability she demands. The by-play of Elly and Peter's reactions on the separate sides of the blanket are brilliant evocations of what lies behind the facade men and women show one another in romantic situations. The old Hollywood, black and white film stock is particularly gorgeous in this scene, as Capra uses minimal light bounced off shining eyeballs and haloed hair. (One of the most widely seen allusions to this scene was in the immensely popular Luke and Laura story on American daytime television serial General Hospital in the early '80s.)

It Happened One Night

The film about the runaway heiress and the newspaper reporter that only Capra wanted to make crystallized the entire screwball comedy genre. The erotic sparks still fly between Gable and Colbert, even if the democratic leveling of class and economic barriers that galvanized Depression audiences is now taken for granted. "It Happened One Night featured something new to the movies--the private fun and man and a woman could have in a private world of their own making" (Raymond Durgnat).

Nothing about the magazine story "Night Bus," by Samuel Hopkins Adams, indicated it would become a much imitated comedy landmark. Adams, a prolific writer of short fiction, novels and biographies, published two magazine stories about women and buses in 1933. Capra may have seen the earlier "Last Trip" about two lost souls meeting on a bus, but it was "Night Bus", about a runaway heiress and a poor but blueblood inventor that inspired him. In the story, Peter Warne is a college-educated chemist, so Capra and writer Robert Riskin decided to remake him as a tough-talking reporter. An even greater challenge was making a spoiled heiress palatable to Depression audiences. Riskin and Capra emphasized, not the spoiled brat that Peter first sees, but an unwillingly pampered princess, aching to make a break for freedom. The incidents in the film were almost all in the story, including the Walls of Jericho, but Riskin's feeling for character and his unerring instinct for cinematic adaption transformed them. And, a ladies' man himself, he had a knack for romantic scenes. He hated sentimentality and thought courtship should be casual, and he liked his heroines resilient as well as seductive.

Capra wanted Robert Montgomery for newshound Peter Warne, but he refused, having just made a bus picture, a not very successful one called Fugitive Lovers. There are some plot similarities ...