#19 Golden Age of Hollywood Series
In his unparalleled thirty-year career, Clark Gable starred in 66 films.
Though nominated three times, he won only one Best Actor Oscar.
Can you guess the film?
If you’re like most people, you are certain he won the Oscar for his legendary performance as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.
You’re wrong.
The King of Hollywood won his lone Oscar for a little film called It Happened One Night.
One of the first screwballs ever made, this little gem shows that the cream does indeed rise to the top.
Columbia started out as a B-movie studio on what was then un-affectionately called poverty row. Unlike the Big Five, Columbia didn’t own any theaters, and they couldn’t afford to keep big stars on the payroll.
Upstart director Frank Capra (who would eventually go on to make It’s A Wonderful Life) convinced the notoriously cheap,crude, and hard-nosed studio head Harry Cohn to get some A-list stars on loan to make a funny little escapist road trip that Capra was sure would cheer up Depression audiences.
It’s a simple setup—Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled rich heiress who runs off (again) when her father wants to annul her marriage to a gold digger. To elude her father’s detectives, she hops on a bus and finds herself sitting next to Gable’s Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter who recognizes her and smells a great story.
He agrees to help her find her husband in exchange for an exclusive. With no money and no street smarts, Ellie has no choice but to reluctantly agree.
At one point, they are forced to spend the night in a one-room cabin, and Peter puts a blanket over a clothesline and pronounces it the Wall of Jericho to protect his—not her—modestly. When Ellie at first refuses to cooperate, Peter begins slowly undressing until she is forced to retreat to her side of the wall. He’s teasing her, but there’s no malice. We know that while Peter would like to get to know Ellie in a more biblical manner, he’s a gentleman and no threat to her reputation.
From his side of the wall, Peter watches Ellie’s shadow as she undresses, and though the scene exists to circumvent production code rules, it’s a sexier moment than if they’d torn each other’s clothes off.
Capra and the code leave something to the imagination, to great effect.
Peter and Ellie learn to appreciate one another—Peter teaches Ellie how to properly dunk a donut, and she shows him a thing or two about successfully hitching a ride.
And when her father’s detectives show up, Peter and Ellie work together seamlessly as a team to throw them off the trail. When they laugh at their success, both Ellie and the audience have forgotten all about her soon-to-be annulled marriage.
As their madcap adventure progresses, their initial disdain slowly melts into love.
We’ve seen this plot a hundred—no, a thousand times before.
But the audiences of 1934 had never seen anything like it, and romantic comedies writers have been ripping off It Happened One Night ever since.
Clark Gable didn’t want to make the film. He was used to the posh comforts of MGM, and he was angry at Louis B. Mayer for loaning him out to Columbia. His co-star Claudette Colbert also wasn’t much interested in the film. She’d been planning a vacation and was forced to cut it short when Columbia met her asking price.
And to be honest, Harry Cohn himself didn’t expect much from the film. It had no big advertising campaign, no thought of Academy Award nominations.
No one involved, it seemed, understood what a special movie they were making.
No one but the audience.
They loved it. Its success came from word of mouth, and the good word spread like wildfire. People saw it, then brought their friends and saw it again. Its initial run went on and on, far longer than anyone could’ve predicted.
And when Oscar time rolled around, this little film that no one thought was anything special became the first film to win all five major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.) In all of Oscar’s history, only two other films have completed that particular quinfecta. The other two are from the modern era: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
It charmed audiences and critics, and if you give it a chance, it’ll charm you too.
Gable is in the type of role he was born to play—a charming rascal with a well-concealed heart of gold. Colbert is perfect as the spoiled heiress with a lot more going on beneath the hood. Their chemistry crackles as they practically burn up the screen with their bickering.
When I covered Possessed, I said it would be the first on a list of six essential films to understand why people still love old Hollywood films.
The second film on that list is It Happened One Night.
It’s the most charming screwball, a movie full of heart and laughs, and a great scene with Colbert and Gable in matching pajamas.
You can stream it for three bucks on Amazon.
Rent it tonight, and see for yourself what happens when the Walls of Jericho come tumbling down.
And learn how to properly dunk your donuts.
Want more? Click here for an index of all posts in this series, as well as source notes and suggested reading.
