It Happened One Night

This past weekend, I watched It Happened One Night (1934) with my husband, who I must say is quite the “chick flick” aficionado. At least a couple times a week, I’ll come home from work, and find a Hugh Grant or Matthew McConaughey movie in the DVD player. (That is, of course, when our two-year-old hasn’t been watching Narnia, Bedtime Stories, or, his current favorite, Cars.) After watching the film in class this semester, I decided to introduce him to one of the very first “chick flicks,” starring a youngish Clark Gable, and the Betty Boop-faced Claudette Colbert. Both actors, then in their early thirties, gave a classic performance in this screwball – or as Netflix calls it, “opposites attract” – comedy.

  

As someone who grew up watching classic films, the unique grammar of Golden Age cinema rarely fazes me. However, watching this movie with my husband, who has had very little exposure to films of this era, gave me a new appreciation for the way in which storytelling has changed over the decades. The first thing my husband noticed was that the film starts very abruptly, with the scene with Claudette Colbert on her father’s ship. The viewer, instead of being given an explicit back-story, is expected to figure out what’s going on based on very few clues. In the same way, there is never a clear explanation as to who the guys are that are standing outside the phone booth where Clark Gable is arguing with his soon-to-be-former employer. We can assume, from Gable’s intoxicated state, that these are his drinking buddies from the bar, or maybe co-workers from the newspaper. But who knows? They might just be a group of passersby who overhead his phone conversation and got caught up in the drama. It was probably decided that these details were not relevant to the plotline, and so an explanation was not necessary. Besides all this, there is also very little in the way of character development, as we often see in contemporary films.

In many of our contemporary romantic comedies, elements of the screwball comedy can be found - the repartee in Fool’s Gold (2008), the strong, independent females in films such as Two Weeks Notice (2002)  and (500) Days of Summer (2009). (In It Happened One Night, we see a new breed of assertive females, from Colbert’s character to the woman sending Gable’s telegram. However, the actual treatment of women in films did not seem to have improved much at this point. We see Colbert’s father slap her, and Gable telling her to shut up – which she does.)

As for the plot of this particular film, the idea of using deception to drive a story has been practiced innumerable times since It Happened One Night. The modern film that I believe most closely parallels this one is Hitch (2005), in which Eva Mendes plays a gossip columnist who is covertly writing a story on one of Will Smith’s clients and his celebrity crush. Smith plays “Hitch,” who helps men learn how to pick up women and sustain a relationship through the first three dates. The “hitch,” so to speak, is that neither Smith nor Mendes know the whole truth about the other’s identity or motive, so when a relationship begins to develop between them, it is partially under false pretenses. More than half way through the film, when Mendes discovers who Smith really is, she feels betrayed and proceeds to plot her revenge on Smith. Of course, as is so often the case in this genre, the misunderstanding is resolved, and by the end of the film, Smith and Mendes are officially a couple.

What I find particular interesting and unique about It Happened One Night, is that the element of deception between the two leading characters is dismissed very early in the story. Within 15 minutes of film time, Gable lets on that he knows Colbert’s true identity, and another ten minutes later, Colbert comes to the realization that he is a reporter. From that point on, the story is dependent on other comedic elements for its humor and plot developments. This is in stark contrast to so many modern romantic comedies (Failure to Launch [2006], While You Were Sleeping [1995]) that carry the deception all the way through the film, using that as the catalyst of the “rising action”  element of the story, which is often the scene in which the characters blow up at one another and one or both storm off – often to an airport to board a plane headed to the other side of the country.

Another aspect of It Happened One Night (and other films of this time period) that stands out in comparison to modern films is that sex is treated very delicately, and only spoken of using innuendoes, such as, “The walls of Jericho are coming down!” In today’s films, we often see and hear as much as the censors will permit, while retaining a PG-13 rating.

The "sexiest" scene in It Happened One Night.

But despite its differences, keeping to true “chick flick” style, our unlikely couple beat the odds and end up together, Colbert becoming maybe the first ever “Runaway Bride.”