“It Happened One Night” - Frank Capra (1934)

It Happened One Night (1934) is not only a classic American romance, but also an iconic representation of “American” virtues.  As such it remains one of the most beloved films, even if some people might dismiss it today as lightweight fare.

The story of the film’s production is interesting in its own right, because there was a kind of Hollywood-style ad hoc nature to the way things were put together [1]. Actors Clark Gable and Claudette (who were not yet, but soon to be, superstars) were far down the list of the producers’ preferred performers.  And the team at Columbia Pictures was continuing to fiddle with the script well into the production schedule.  When the film was first released, it was initially only a modest hit; but as it was distributed more widely, it took off at the box office and became a smash.  It swept the principal 1935 US Academy Awards, winning the five most prestigious Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Script (Robert Riskin), Best Leading Actor (Clark Gable), and Best Leading Actress (Claudette Colbert) [2].  And watching the film today, I would say that it hasn’t lost any of its magic.

So to what can we attribute It Happened One Night’s great success?  Well, for one thing it was clearly something of a romantic comedy with star performers.  And it also featured the always fascinating theme of “lovers on the run”, about which I have commented in connection with my reviews of Breathless (1960) and Badlands (1973).  But I would say that some of the film’s special virtues come from the directing style of Frank Capra.  

There are two aspects of Capra’s mise-en-scene that are notable.  For one thing ,Capra – working with his usual partners, script-writer Robert Riskin and cinematographer Joseph Walker – tended to fashion fast-paced narratives that cover a lot of ground in short spaces of screen time.  Capra’s films often jump ahead to the juicy human-interaction parts, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination concerning details as to just how we got there. He seemed to have an intuitive feel for this, since he is said to have often begun his productions, like Wong Kar-Wai of more recent times, without having much of a script in his hand. 

A second aspect of Capra’s films is his feel for “Americana” – the cultural self-image that Americans have fashioned for themselves that feature the virtues of openness, freedom, fair play, and brotherhood.  This involves an appreciation for the common man that eschews any preferential considerations of class and refinement. There are elements of fantasy to this, but not entirely so, and this is widely understood.  In fact it is due to America’s cultural image that so many people from foreign shores dream of coming to live in the US. So Capra’s films often take place in a relatively communitarian context among ordinary people, which was an appropriate setting for the popular social and political themes during Capra’s heyday in the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression. In fact Capra’s Americana theme was even more prominently present in his succeeding films, such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946) [3]. Here in It Happened One Night this element is much more in the background and primarily serves to provide a contextual shading to the principal male character, Peter Warne.  For this reason I think It Happened One Night is Capra’s best film.

The story of It Happened One Night races through five unequally-spaced segments (covering more than one night, by the way).

1.  Partings

In the opening scene, spoiled rich girl Ellie Andrews (played by Claudette Colbert) is shown sequestered on her millionaire father Alexander’s (Walter Connolly) yacht off Miami, where she is being confined so that she cannot interrupt her father’s efforts to annul her recent marriage to rakish fortune hunter King Westley.  But she petulantly jumps off the yacht and somehow swims ashore, eluding the rescue efforts of her father’s minions.  In the next shots, an instance of a Capra-Riskin narrative leap forward, Ellie is shown, now fully clothed and with a suitcase, furtively buying a bus ticket to New York City, where King Westley lives.  

Separately at the same Miami bus station, newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) is shown in a pay phone booth drunkenly arguing with his editor in New York.  The exasperated editor tells Peter he is fired and then hangs up on him.

So Ellie and Peter, both now cut off from their past lives, get on the bus to New York and sit next to each other in the last available seat.

2.  On the Bus

Peter is brash and assertive, while Ellie is proud and used to getting her own way.  So their initial interactions are amusingly unpleasant.  At a bus stop, Peter notices a newspaper photo identifying Ellie as a renowned socialite who has gone missing.  When he mentions this to Ellie, she tries to buy him off to preserve her secrecy, thereby offending Peter’s pride.  But Peter, eyeing a big newspaper scoop for himself in the making, decides to attach himself to Ellie, and he gradually takes over as her guardian. There is an amusing scene in this connection where Peter rids Ellie of a fellow bus traveler, Shapeley (Roscoe Karns), who has ludicrously been making unseemly propositions to her.

In the evening, the bus trip is interrupted when they come to a washed-out bridge, and all the bus-riders are compelled to spend the night in a nearby motel.   Due to lack of funds, Peter and Ellie have to stay in a single cabin, so Peter registers them as man and wife.  To maintain some semblance of propriety, Peter strings a rope between the room’s two single beds and hangs a blanket from the rope, which he sarcastically calls the “Walls of Jericho”.  There is a famous scene here where Peter begins to undress in front of Ellie, causing her to flee to the other side of the “wall”.

Up to this point Peter and Ellie are together, but there is no warmth between them. Ellie wants to get back to her husband King Westley, and Peter is looking after her in order to make money.

3.  Getting Closer

In the morning Peter cordially makes breakfast for Ellie, and they begin to open up to each other. Throughout all these scenes, Peter sees himself as the worldly pragmatist and Ellie as a spoiled brat who doesn’t know anything about practical affairs.  He is flabbergasted that she doesn’t even know the proper way to dunk a doughnut, so he tutors her.  And when Alexander’s hired detectives come to the motel searching for Ellie, our errant couple are thrilled that their instantly improvised cover act as a bickering married couple fools the detectives. But Alexander is getting desperate, and he announces in the press a $10,000 reward to anyone who can return her to him.  

Back on the bus (the washed-out bridge problem now apparently solved), the passengers are serenaded by some minstrel musicians who are traveling with them.  This is a purely Capraesque interlude, wherein the disparate collection of bus riders show their inherent fraternity by all joining in to sing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”.  Even the bus driver exuberantly joins in the raucous chorus, which leads him to crash the bus off the road.  With the bus disabled and Peter more worried about other riders learning Ellie’s identity (Shapeley already knows and is sent packing by Peter), Peter ushers Ellie off the road and into the forest.

Now alone together, there is more bickering and bantering between the always assertive Peter and the complaining Ellie, but they are getting to know each other better.  They spend the night sleeping among some haystacks, and there is a point where the momentarily compassionate Peter almost kisses her.  The next day out on the road, they try hitchhiking, and Ellie surprisingly (and famously) demonstrates to a chagrined Peter that a woman’s way can be better.

Ellie’s father, Alexander, has now become so worried about his vanished daughter that he finally agrees to stop contesting her marriage with Westley.  All is forgiven, he tells her through the press, just come home.

Back on the road again (now with a car that Peter has commandeered from a thief), Ellie, who is warming to Peter, urges him to stop at motel a few hours short of New York City.  In their cabin with another “Wall of Jericho” blanket in place, Ellie asks Peter across the partition if he has ever thought about love.  He confides to her his dreams, and Ellie is so moved, she rushes around the blanket and throws herself at his feet, telling him she loves him. Peter, accustomed to his chaperone role and always thinking of her as a spoiled brat, is too shocked to respond.  He tells her to return to her bed. Later, in the early morning, though, he realizes that she is truly the one for him.  With Ellie still asleep, he rushes out of the cabin and drives to New York in order to quickly resurrect his job at the newspaper, so that he can return and manfully make a proper marriage proposal.

It looks like they have found their true love.  But there is still one-quarter of the narrative remaining, and it is here that the dramatic tension mounts.

4.  Misunderstandings

Ellie wakes up to find Peter gone, and she assumes he has abandoned her, probably to get the $10,000 reward from her father.  She phones her father, and he and Westley come to fetch her.  When Peter learns that she has returned to Westley, he feels that he was just used all along by Ellie and abandons his hopes.  So both Peter and Ellie have both lost faith in each other.

5.  The Wedding Ceremony

Ellie wants to go ahead and have a formal, high-society-blessed wedding, and preparations are begun. However, Alexander suspects something is wrong and gets Ellie confide to him that she fell in love with Peter, but feels scorned by him.  She says she must go through with her planned life with Westley anyway in order to save face.

Just before the wedding, Peter, still concerned with his manly pride, grumpily comes to Alexander’s office, not to ask for the $10,000 reward, but merely to get paid $39.60 for his expenses with Ellie. As Peter is about to depart, Alexander pursues his suspicions: 

Alexander: “Do you love my daughter?”

Peter: “Any guy that would fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head                      examined.” 

. . .   

Alexander: “Do you love her?” 

Peter: “A normal human being man couldn’t live under the same roof with her without            going nutty.  She’s my idea of nothing.” 

Alexander: “I asked you a simple question: do you love her?” 

Peter: “Yes! But don’t hold that against me.  I’m a little screwy myself.”

Alexander now knows what the viewer has known: Peter and Ellie love each other.  So it is clear to Alexander that with time running out, something has to be done.  The outdoor wedding ceremony is about to begin.  King Westley flamboyantly arrives in his autogyro. The stage is set for the dramatic finale.

What makes It Happened One Night special is the combination of the on-the-road interactions between Peter and Ellie and the melodramatic events of that last quarter of the film (acts 4 and 5). 

The acting in the film is generally appropriate and effective for the fast-paced narrative in which it is situated.  And of course Clark Gable displays his good-humored, virile magnetism.  But I think Claudette Colbert’s performance as Ellie is an even more significant virtue.  Capra apparently found her difficult on the production set, but his improvisational style probably helped bring out what is truly a spirited and emotionally moving performance [4].  All in all, this was one of Hollywood’s most satisfying productions.

One of the interesting dramatic highlights is the role played by Ellie’s father, Alexander.  In many films about a star-crossed young couple, the parents are most often roadblocks to romantic passions. They are usually more concerned about social class and their own interests than about their children’s romantic happiness.  And in the early part of the film, Alexander seems to be just such a typical domineering parent.  But in the end, the greatest romantic in the story is the parent, Alexander. Like the elders’ romantic sensibilities in A Room with a View (1985), we see that it is this aging parent who is revealed to be the truly benign agent of romantic love.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Farran Smith Nehme, “It Happened One Night: All Aboard!”, The Criterion Collection, (17 November 2014). 
2. There have only been three films in history that have swept the “Big Five” Oscars.  The other two are One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
3. Nevertheless, Capra was not a supporter of the US Democratic Party, which was the preferred party of the labor unions.  He was a lifelong Republican.
4. Eric Pace, “Claudette Colbert, Unflappable Heroine of Screwball Comedies, Is Dead At 92", The New York Times (31 July 1996). 

“Lost Horizon” - Frank Capra (1937)

“There are moments in every man’s life when he glimpses the eternal.”                                                                        – Robert Conway

Lost Horizon (1937) is a film that probably everyone should see at some point.  Although it is not without some limitations, the film provides an eloquent narrative expression of two key cultural metaphors – the search for the ideal, harmonious society and our all-too-often failures to hold onto the truly miraculous things that we stumble upon in life.  The story of the film was based on the best-selling 1933 novel of the same name by James Hilton [1].  It was then fashioned by the popular Hollywood director-screenwriter team of Frank Capra and Robert Riskin into what became a classic. 

Actually, the film was not immediately a hit and ran into problems early on.  The film was set in the Himalayas and had the largest (up to that time) production budget.  But Capra overran the budget by a considerable margin.  The overruns were not due to expensive location photography – Capra relied on stock footage for many of the Tibetan mountain scenes – but instead was due to Capra’s extensive reshootings of various studio scenes.  When he was finished, Capra had a 3½-hour film [2], a length for which the viewing public of that day was not ready.  The film was eventually cut down to 132 minutes, but it was still not a box-office hit early on [3].

The story concerns a small group of people who are brought against their will by serendipity to the obscure, hidden Tibetan kingdom of Shangri-La, where most of the action takes place.  This Shangri-La turns out to be an idyllic utopia that we could only dream about, and the term “Shangri-La” entered the popular vocabulary as a term for a mythical paradise [4].  But it is not just a heavenly place that we cherish from watching this story, but the heavenly state of mind that it engenders within the characters who visit this place.  This is what makes the story a classic.  In fact the famous Latin American novel, Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953) by Ajexo Carpentier takes up the same theme in a South American setting and is also a work well worth reading.

The story goes through a classic narrative progression of four sections: journey to –> entry –> engage –> departure.

1.  Escape from Baskul
At the beginning we find British diplomat Robert Conway sent to the war-torn Chinese city of Baskul to arrange for the escape of 90 Europeans who are trying to flee a violent local revolution. At the airfield Conway shepherds the remaining Europeans onto any spare planes that can be found to rush the refugees out. At the last moment, he and the final handful of foreigners barely make it onto the last getaway plane as the runway is overrun with rioting combatants. With the plane in the air, we are introduced to what will turn out to be the principal characters:

• Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) – a suave Englishman who is thought soon to be appointed the next British Foreign Secretary. He is evidently also a political scholar and has authored some well-known books on political philosophy.
• George Conway (John Howard) – Robert’s younger, more emotionally immature brother.
• Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell) – a down-to-earth businessman.
• Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton) – a stuffy academic paleontologist who has been conducting research in China.
• Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell) – a hardened young floozie of uncertain virtue who seems to be terminally ill from consumption.

As the flight over China continues, the passengers discover that their plane has been hijacked and is being piloted by a mysterious Asian who has headed the plane not to the safety of Shanghai but to some unknown destination over the western mountains.  After a half hour of screen time, the plane eventually crashes high up in the Himalayan mountains, killing the pilot and leaving the passengers shaken but alive.  Their prospects of survival in the mountainous wilderness look dim at this point, but they are fortuitously met by a party of Tibetan mountain men headed by a  English-speaking Chinaman named Chang (H. B. Warner).

2.  Arrival in Shangri-La
Chang leads the five survivors along narrow cliff ledges and over a perilously dangerous mountain pass until they reach a mysterious valley that is bathed in sunlight: Shangri-La. This is the sight of Chang’s monastery, and the entire valley, though essentially inaccessible to the outside world, seems extraordinarily prosperous and civilized.  The people there live in complete harmony and want for nothing.  There is no acquisitiveness or jealousy, only good will and kindness. 

As the five survivors wander about Shangri-La, we learn more about both them and their new paradise.  Henry Barnard is a man on the run from the US authorities for embezzlement.  Alexander Lovett, nicknamed “Lovey” by Barnard, is a pompous professor who seeks to uncover objective knowledge. Barnard, on the other hand, is a pragmatist and a man of skill – he discovers things by direct interaction.  Robert Conway is inquisitive and reflective – he wants to learn more about the nature of Shangri-La from the generally taciturn Chang.  Robert Conway also meets and is immediately attracted to a beautiful European resident of Shangri-La, Sondra (Jane Wyatt).  His impatient and self-centered brother George has no interest in Shangri-La and merely wants to return to “civilization” as quickly as possible, but he, too, becomes attracted to another one of the rare resident Europeans, a pretty Russian girl named Maria (Margo).

3.  Settling In
Eventually Robert Conway has an audience with the High Lama of Shangri-La, who turns out to be a former Belgian Catholic priest, Father Perrault (Sam Jaffe), who long ago wandered into the valley and eventually founded the lamasery.  Conway is astonished to learn that Father Perrault is more than 250 years old and that the beneficial spiritual atmosphere of their locale greatly retards the aging process.  In fact, Perrault tells Conway, Maria, who looks 20, is actually more than 70 years old.  But if a youthful-appearing person should happen to leave Shangri-La, Perrault warns, he or she will undergo sudden and dramatic aging.  Conway also learns that he and his colleagues were essentially kidnaped and brought to Shangri-La by design.  It is Perrault’s and Sondra’s intention to have Robert Conway remain in Shangri-La and eventually assume the duties of the High Lama himself.  As he tells this to Robert, Perrault dies peacefully.

Meanwhile Henry, Lovey, and Gloria are all getting into the spirit of Shangri-La and are in no haste to leave the place.  Indeed the benign environment of Shangri-La seems to have cured Gloria of her terminal ailment.

4.  Departure from Shangri-La
George Conway, though, is determined to get away and take Maria with him.  He has arranged for some native porters to guide them out of the area, and he wants his brother to go with him.  The two brothers then have an interesting conversation about Shangri-La.  Robert tells George about the spiritual wonders of the place and his interest in staying, while George insists that the whole story about virtue and longevity is paranormal rubbish that defies scientific logic and that Perrault was a charlatan. George summons Maria, who scornfully laughs when she hears about Perrault’s assertions concerning her age.  She insists to Robert that she clearly really is only 20-years old.  Reluctantly, Robert gives in to the hard-headed logic of George’s argument and agrees to leave with them and abandon Sondra.

Once away and up in the mountains, Robert, George, and Maria are abandoned by their hired porters and are left on their own in the bitter cold.  Maria immediately withers to a 70-year-old woman and dies, spurring the unstable George to commit suicide. 

Robert eventually makes it back to civilization but is in woeful condition and suffers from amnesia.  Much of the remaining few minutes of the film are then related by newspaper headlines and third-person accounts.  Robert Conway is reported to have eventually recovered his memory and spent the next year maniacally determined to return to the impossible-to-reach Shangri-La.  A fellow British Foreign Service officer, Lord Gainsford, is assigned to find Robert and bring him home, but he abandons his efforts after a year of trying.  When Gainsford returns to London and is asked by his colleagues if he believes in all that rubbish that Robert Conway was talking about concerning that mythical Shangri-La, he answers in the affirmative: “yes, I believe it, because I want to believe it.”

The story of Lost Horizon is a fantasy about paradise found, lost, and the desperate attempts to regain those “lost steps”.  As such, the tale fits into the Frank Capra’s Hollywood production values, and much of the production is effective.  Ronald Coleman, as Robert Conway, is the perfect protagonist – sensitive, reflective, and idealistic.  Capra’s characteristic stock characters, for example “Lovey”, Gloria, and Henry, are, of course, schematic, but their presence makes Coleman’s character that much more believable and worthy of empathy.  Unfortunately, Dimitri Tiomkin’s over-the-top musical score is something of a hindrance, but you get used to it after awhile. 

There are some unexplained puzzles in the story, though, that seem to be gaping holes. 

• If Shangri-La is so physically inaccessible (as is shown in the entry and departure sections of the film), how did those porters manage to bring so many large artifacts to the place, like the grand piano and the huge church bells?
• If the all-pervasive ethics of Shangri-La are so devoted to selfless humility and kindness,  how did Father Perrault and Sondra reconcile their high values with their plan to kidnap all five foreigners  (not just Robert) to Shangri-La and subject them to life-threatening risks and violence?
• Since Maria ages dramatically when she departs from Shangri-La, she must actually have had the age that Father Perrault attributed to her.  So why did she lie about her age to Robert Conway if she knew that departure from Shangru-La would return her to a decrepit condition?

I doubt these things were explained even in Capra’s 210-minute version of the film, but never mind.  These mysteries, I guess, are minor quibbles if the narrative telling manages to get away with them.  Nevertheless, I have one further complaint about Capra’s ending to the story.  At the very close of the film, the viewer sees Robert Conway up in the mountains still searching for Shangri-La and finally finding that hidden pass into the valley.  This is Capra’s feel-good ending, but I think it would have been more effective to leave us with the uncertainty about Robert Conway’s ultimate fate.  Then we would be faced with what Lord Gainsford in the story faced – the uncertainty that can only be resolved by what we want to believe.

★★★½

Notes:

1. James Hilton also authored two other much-loved best-sellers, Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1934) and Random Harvest (1941), which were also quickly turned into big box-office movie hits – Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1939) and Random Harvest (1942).
2. Even so, Capra had a shooting ratio of about 60-to-1 for the film.
3. The film was shot with the then standard nitrate stock, which inevitably deteriorated over time.  In addition, later releases, such as 90-minute cut-down versions of  the original, led to neglect of some of the original footage. In 1973 the American Film Institute, along with UCLA and Columbia Pictures, launched an extended effort to find extent footage in order restore the original 132-minute version.  After 13 years they were able to restore most of it, although some restored elements are of poor quality.
4. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangri-la.