Three movies have managed to win all five ‘major’ Academy Awards in the history of cinema – best picture, director, actor and actress in leading roles, screenplay. Frank Capra‘s ‘It Happened One Night‘ was the first of them, in 1934. It would be 42 years before all five awards would be awarded to another single film, and another 16 until the next and last (for now) one. Capra‘s film defined the rules of a very popular genre that combined comedies, romantic stories and social commentary and propelled the Columbia studios into the ranks of the big Hollywood film houses. In Frank Capra‘s career, it is the most successful film in the decade when everything seemed to be going perfectly for the Sicilian-born director who arrived on American shores at the age of six. Above all, ‘It Happened One Night‘ is a film that, even watched again today, over 90 years after its release, not only allows us to understand its success at the time, but is also a more than enjoyable entertainment today.
‘It Happened One Night‘ can also be considered a road movie. The story takes place over the four days and nights of Ellie’s journey from Florida to New York, having escaped from the yacht where her father, the owner of an immense fortune and a corresponding influence, had kidnapped her to avoid marriage to a young aviator whom he considered frivolous and unworthy of the hand of his precious daughter. This time the father was right and destiny decided that Ellie had the luck to meet Peter Warne, a recently fired journalist, on the Greyhound bus. The beautiful and spoiled young woman has no idea how to live among ordinary people and is also being searched for by the police in all the states on her road on the East Coast and by those interested to earn the 10 thousand dollar reward promised by her father. Peter helps her in exchange for the promise of receiving the rights for the exclusive publication of the adventure in the press. During the journey, as happens in the movies, the relationship between the two turns into something else, and Ellie’s road to the altar will have surprises in store for everyone.
This film belongs to a genre of romantic comedy in which some of the situations originate from the differences in social classes between the characters in love. As in other Frank Capra films, however, the story does not take place in a vacuum or artificial setting. ‘It Happened One Night‘ takes us to America during the Depression years with the trains that transported the uprooted people in search of a job. Some of the scenes are filmed on buses that were the meeting place of the less well-off social classes, and one of the funniest scenes is the confrontation between the rich heiress and the simple women in line at the communal bathroom of a cheap motel. At the same time, ‘It Happened One Night‘ is also a romantic comedy with unexpected erotic tension, expressed discreetly and humorously in the cult scene of the motel room divided in two by the improvised screen called ‘the walls of Jericho’. Clark Gable is not part of the list of my favorite actors and he did not become one after I saw ‘It Happened One Night‘, but the humor and charisma work better in this film than in others. Claudette Colbert, on the other hand, is captivating, with her French charm in a role of a disheveled American princess. The alert editing, the mobile camera, the rather unusual and some authentic exteriors, recreating the atmosphere of the 1930s, manage to provide today’s viewer with the cinematic experience of a film that is unavoidable and not only for its archival value.