Title: It Happened One Night
Year: 1934
Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert
Director: Frank Capra
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Director: Frank Capra
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Is It Any Good?: It is a true classic and a film that if we were without America’s truly great medium would not be the same. Thankfully it was preserved by the National Film Registry in 1993. This road trip/slapstick/romantic comedy sees spoiled rich girl Ellie Andrews trying to escape her father’s “overbearing” toll on her love life. She jumps into the water off the coast of Miami, it is there that she meets newspaperman Peter Warne a heck of a guy with a heck of an eye, for a story that is. It’s from there we get shenanigans, craziness and genuine screwball comedy at it’s finest. So let yourself, love, laugh and enjoy. Tear down the Walls of Jericho whether solo or with the one you love!
Memorable Quote: Peter Warne: I want to see what love looks like when it’s triumphant. I haven’t had a good laugh in a week.
Competition: Let’s start with the Cecil B. DeMille epic also starring Claudette Colbert Cleopatra which could’ve easily got her the statue she did win for her role in It Happened One Night. We also have Fred Astaire in his true breakout with Ginger Rogers with the feature The Gay Divorcee. A truly great mystery film icon with William Powell in The Thin Man, and lastly, the Howard Hawks directed and David O. Selznick produced MGM biopic of Mexican patriot Pancho Villa entitled Viva Villa!. So while these are pretty great films none of them are quite at the level of winner It Happened One Night.
Next up we have another Clark Gable film this time with the man he dethroned as Best Actor 1933 winner Charles Laughton. And directed by 1933 Best picture winner Cavalcade’s head honcho! Stay here at Viral Hare as we continue and remember I Love You!