Taking my clue from David Denby’s look at the evolution of romantic comedies, A Fine Romance, Sunday evening NewMexiKen watched It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The 1934 Frank Capra film is considered the first wacky romantic comedy — a genre culminating most recently with Knocked Up. Any 73 year old film will be dated; even so this one is totally enjoyable. And it doesn’t take too much imagination to realize what a breakthrough it was. Gable was 32 and Colbert 30 when they made the movie, which won all five top Oscars — best picture, best actor, best actress, direction and screenplay.
Denby had this to say about the film:
As everyone agrees, this kind of romantic comedy—and particularly the variant called “screwball comedy”—lifted off in February, 1934, with Frank Capra’s charming “It Happened One Night,” in which a hard-drinking reporter out of a job (Clark Gable) and an heiress who has jumped off her father’s yacht (Claudette Colbert) meet on the road somewhere between Florida and New York. Tough and self-sufficient, Gable contemptuously looks after the spoiled rich girl. He’s rude and overbearing, and she’s miffed, but it helps their acquaintance a little that they are both supremely attractive—Gable quick-moving but large and, in his famous undressing scene, meaty, and Colbert tiny, with a slightly pointed chin, round eyes, and round breasts beneath the fitted striped jacket she buys on the road. When she develops pride, they become equals.
The cinema added something invaluable to the romantic comedy: the camera’s ability to place lovers in an enchanted, expanding envelope of setting and atmosphere. It moves with them at will, enlarging their command of streets, fields, sitting rooms, and night clubs; rapid cutting then doubles the speed of their quarrels. Out on the road, in the middle of the Depression, Gable and Colbert join the poor, the hungry, the shysters and the hustlers; they spend a night among haystacks, get fleeced, practice their hitchhiking skills.