It Happened One Night movie storyline. In Miami, the spoiled socialite Ellie Andrews is trapped in the yacht of her controller father, the Wall Street banker Andrews, who has just annulled her secret marriage with the snobbish aviator King Westley. Out of the blue, Ellie jumps overboard and swims to the shore. Andrews hires a detective agency to find her and offers a 10,000 dollars reward for any information about his daughter. But Ellie pawns her watch, buys some clothing and a bus ticket to New York to meet her lover. She seats side-by-side with the cynical reporter Peter Warne.
However, when a thief steals her purse with her money in a bus stop and Ellie does not report to the police, Peter recognizes and blackmails Ellie, asking her to travel together with him. He promises to protect her and in return he would write her adventure to meet King Westley. Along their journey, Ellie falls in love for Peter; but when he vanishes from the motel where they are lodged and contacts her father later, she believes he was only interested in the reward. In the end, love triumphs and the wall of Jericho falls.
It Happened One Night (1934) is one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history, and a film that has endured in popularity. It is considered one of the pioneering “screwball” romantic comedies of its time, setting the pattern for many years afterwards along with another contemporary film, The Thin Man (1934).
The escapist theme of the film, appropriate during the Depression Era, is the story of the unlikely romantic pairing of a mis-matched couple – a gruff and indifferent, recently-fired newspaper man (Gable) and a snobbish, superior-acting heiress (Colbert) – a runaway on the lam. It is a reversal of the Cinderella story (the heroine rejects her wealthy lifestyle), a modern tale with light-hearted sex appeal in which courtship and love triumph over class conflicts, socio-economic differences, and verbal battles of wit.
The madcap film from Columbia Studios (one of the lesser studios) was an unexpected runaway box office sleeper hit (especially after it began to play in small-town theaters), and it garnered the top five Academy Awards (unrivaled until 1975, forty-one years later by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – and then again by The Silence of the Lambs (1991).) It won all five of its nominated categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin).
The film, composed mostly of a road trip (by bus, car, foot, and by thumb in locales such as bus depots or interiors of buses, and the open road) by the social-class-unmatched couple, contains some of the most classic scenes ever made: the “Walls of Jericho” scene in an auto-camp bungalow so that they can sleep in the same room out of wedlock, the doughnuts-dunking lesson, the hitchhiking scene, the night-time scene on a haystack in a deserted barn, and the dramatic wedding scene. With his good-natured, street-smart, and breezy performance, Gable influenced the un-sale of undershirts by taking off his shirt and exposing his bare chest, and bus travel by women substantially increased as a result of the film.
It Happened One Night (1934)
Directed by: Frank Capra
Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Jameson Thomas, Alan Hale, Arthur Hoyt, Blanche Friderici, Charles C. Wilson, Ernie Adams, William Bailey, Ward Bond
Screenplay by: Robert Riskin
Cinematography by: Joseph Walker
Film Editing by: Gene Havlick
Costume Design by: Robert Kalloch
Art Direction by: Stephen Goosson
Music by: Howard Jackson
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: February 22, 1934
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