February 22, 1934—When MGM and Paramount Pictures
loaned Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert to Columbia Pictures
for a single movie, nobody expected much to come from the results, especially
the reluctant stars. But It Happened One Night—which premiered
at Radio City Music Hall on this date—became a box-office hit, a multi-Oscar
smash, and one of the most influential and beloved movies of all time.
Initial reaction to the film (which I touched on briefly in a prior post) was mixed: its run was
not extended beyond its first week at Radio City, and a number of critics were
quick to carp that this was the third movie in quick succession about a bus
trip. Ultimately, of course, once word of mouth spread in the first month after
its release, the film’s success triggered an entirely different trend, one of
the most glorious genres in cinema history: the screwball comedy, often featuring a runaway/madcap heiress, with a plot that takes off in unexpected directions, and, above all, in what James Harvey, in his 1987 history of the genre, Romantic Comedy, calls "some new kind of energy": "slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental--and powerfully romantic."
During its initial run, the movie made more than six
times what it cost to produce, confirming that director Frank Capra, who had made it his special project, had his pulse on
the audience. Its triumph at the Academy Awards the following year was even
more resounding, as it became the first picture to sweep all the major
categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best
Screenplay. (In the eight decades since, only two other movies have matched
that feat: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.)
You would think that every major star in Hollywood
would do anything to appear in such a hot property, including (but hardly
limited to) willingness to beg, borrow, steal, take a salary cut, murder, or
sleep with the producer. You would also be wrong.
Robert Montgomery, a talented actor with some flair
for comedy, turned down the male lead before the script made its way to Gable.
The only reason he took it was
because MGM head Louis B. Mayer wanted to teach lessons in humility and
obedience to the box-office star well on his way to becoming known as “The King
of Hollywood.” Gable’s rejection of a script triggered a reaction from Mayer
that was swift, decisive and self-defeating: If that’s what you want, fine—but I’m lending you out to Columbia
Pictures.
In late 1933, that was far, far worse than it sounds
now. MGM had the reputation as the “prestige” studio, largely due to its
unparalleled group of stars and production head Irving Thalberg; Warner
Brothers, as a scrappy, ripped-from-the-headlines outfit specializing in
gangster and socially conscious films; and Paramount, where Cecil B. DeMille,
Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch operated with comparatively little
executive interference, as a “director’s studio.” On the other hand, Columbia,
headed by obstreperous, penny-pinching Harry Cohn, still had not overcome its
origins on “Poverty Row,” a row of offices specializing in cheap productions.
Columbia had few if any A-list actors of its own, and the only way it could acquire any was if (as in Gable’s case) a
star at another studio had demanded one raise or script-approval request too
many.
According to Capra's marvelous and indispensable memoir, The Name Above the Title, Gable showed up at Capra’s office unshaven, drunk,
and abusive enough to tell the director, in no uncertain terms, what he could
do with himself and this project. Colbert, while more polite, was equally
reluctant. She had not liked the results of their first collaboration several
years before, and when Capra showed up on her doorstep, she announced that she
would only make the movie if a) it could be completed in four weeks, in time for
her planned Christmas vacation in Sun Valley, and b) her salary would be
$50,000—double her normal amount at Paramount. Capra got Cohn to agree to the
terms, and a visit that had begun on a rough note (Colbert’s dog had bitten
Capra in the rear end) ended up better than expected.
You have to ask why the stars were so reluctant to
shoot the film, aside from the fact that the initial title, Night Bus, was an unpleasant reminder of
two prior box-office bombs. But other actors were equally reluctant to take on
the job, particularly for Colbert’s role, the runaway heiress Ellie Andrews, which
Myrna Loy, Constance Bennett, Margaret Sullavan, and Miriam Hopkins had all
rejected.
These women were not really acting like divas. In the original
script, Ellie had simply been a spoiled brat—the Depression version of Kim
Kardashian. At the suggestion of Capra’s friend, producer-screenwriter Myles
Connolly, Ellie was rewritten not so much as a bratty heiress but as one bored
by her stultifying lifestyle, a princess ready to flee from routine—sort of like
Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday two
decades later. The resulting rewrite, completed by Capra and screenwriter
Robert Riskin within a week, went a long way toward making her more sympathetic
to Depression audiences.
The evolution of Ellie—crucial not just to the
success of the film, but to the creation of the whole screwball comedy genre—also
owed something to a change in the depiction of female sexuality as a result of
Hollywood’s newly enforced list of censorship norms, the Production Code. In the
early 1930s, films had often featured what were deemed women of loose morals—if
not outright hookers (Joan Crawford, in Rain),
then kept women who had slept their way to the top or forced by circumstance into cohabitating with
an exploiter (Capra’s own Bitter Tea of
General Yen). All of that went by the wayside with the Production Code.
Now, a madcap heiress—willful and rebellious against Daddy, like Ellie, but not
promiscuous—would allow filmmakers to obey the dictates of the Production Code
while still winking broadly at them.
And so occurred several of the more widely discussed
elements in the movie: the glimpse of leg Ellie permits, immediately besting
Gable’s Peter Warne in a hitchhiking bid; the makeshift “Walls of Jericho,” or clothesline
erected by Warne in a motel room so Ellie need not fear “the big bad wolf”
(i.e., him); and the naked torso revealed by Gable in the same scene. (The
latter was an improvisation when Gable was having trouble maintaining the
energy of the scene while removing his undershirt.)
As happens in Hollywood to this day, It Happened One Night spawned countless
imitations, in an attempt to cash in on a good thing--some decidedly "B" level (The Golden Arrow), others top grade (My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby). None, however (including
the 1950s musical adaptation, You Can’t
Run Away From It, starring Jack Lemmon and June Allyson) worked as well as
the original.
It all went back to the film's ineffable charm. Capra might have shot the film fast, but he really wasn’t
interested in cutting its running time. In fact, he indulged here one of the tricks he would
use repeatedly over the next dozen years of his prime: stage a scene that does
not advance the plot, but makes you care about the characters. A prime example
comes when the fired working-class reporter Warne teaches high-class Ellie the
fine art of donut dunking.
Colbert refused to believe the film would work, even
by the end of shooting (“Am I glad to get here,” she’s supposed to have told her
Sun Valley friends. “I’ve just finished the worst picture in the world.”) She
was initially a no-show at the Oscars, having to be called while waiting for a
train to pick up her award.
A daffy, happy ending, featuring a lovely heroine who’s a
bit of a bill. Not unlike the whole screwball genre itself.
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