See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
U.S. (Columbia) 105m BW
Director: Frank Capra
Producer: Frank Capra, Harry Cohn
Screenplay: Samuel Hopkins Adams, Robert Riskin
Photography: Joseph Walker
Music: Howard Jackson, Louis Silvers
Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Jameson Thomas, Alan Hale, Arthur Hoyt, Blanche Frederici, Charles C. Wilson
Oscars: Frank Capra, Harry Cohn (best picture), Frank Capra (director), Robert Riskin (screenplay), Clark Gable (actor), Claudette Colbert (actress)
Venice Film Festival: Frank Capra nomination (Mussolini Cup)
Peter (Clark Gable) is a tough-talking journalist; Ellie (Claudette Colbert) is a dizzy dame on the run from home and her father. The two meet while on the road and are forced, reluctantly, to collaborate. Hes the salt of the earth, shes a rich kid, and each exploits the otherfor him, she means a big newspaper story, for her, hes a way to help her get to New York and a forbidden fiancé. In the course of the story, they move from antagonism to love. It could be one of a hundred routine, American romantic comedies of the 1930s or 1940s.
But, make no mistake, Frank Capras It Happened One Nightthe first of only three movies to win all five major Academy Awards, preceding One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Silence of the Lambs (1991)is movie magic. This has something to do with how it conjures an entire milieu: a peoples
America filled with unlikely rogues and soft-hearted citizens, always ready to share a story and a song, or simply exhibit their lovable eccentricities. But the film is also careful to explore exceptions to its basic rule: Ellies father, Andrews (Walter Connolly), turns out to be a pretty swell chap, just as the talkative bus passenger Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) ends up a weasel.
Capra was expert at cleverly weaving a story from altogether familiar and ordinary motifs: eating, verbal slang (ah, nuts), snoring, washing, dressing and undressing. True to the romantic comedy formula, identities are momentarily dissolved whenever a masquerade is necessary or able to be exploited for secret entertainmentalthough, whenever Peter and Ellie pretend to be husband and wife, more serious possibilities and destinies do suggest themselves.
It Happened One Night is a distant predecessor of todays trash comedies, such as those by the Farrelly Brothers. Ass jokes abound and the pretensions and privileges of the wealthy are mercilessly mocked, while Colberts famous, bare legs stop traffic. And then there is the sexual tension angle: Working patiently through four nights of Peter and Ellie together, the entire film hinges on the symbolism of the walls of Jericho finally topplingthe ridding of the blanket that stands, weakly and tremblingly, as the barrier to the consummation of their growing love.
Critics can't rhapsodize over Capras powers of montage or mise-en-scène; style was a functional, conventional matter for him. But he did have a perfect sense of script (in both overall structure and small details), and a brilliant rapport with his charismatic actors. Gable and Colbert help to truly equalize this one-upmanship battle of the sexes, diluting that ideological thrust of the script that suggests that proletarian guys should teach spoiled gals a thing or two about real life. In the infectious interplay of these starsin their mutual willingness to play, to laugh, to be vulnerable, to take a joke as good they give itwe encounter an ideal that has been well and truly lost in contemporary, mainstream cinema: fighting reciprocity between the sexes. AM
See all movies from the 1930s
1930s
THE THIN MAN (1934)
U.S. (Cosmopolitan, MGM) 93m BW
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Producer: Hunt Stromberg
Photography: James Wong Howe
Screenplay: Albert Hackett, from novel by Dashiell Hammett
Music: William Axt
Cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Maureen OSullivan, Nat Pendleton, Minna Gombell, Porter Hall, Henry Wadsworth, William Henry, Harold Huber, Cesar Romero, Natalie Moorhead, Edward Brophy, Edward Ellis, Cyril Thornton
Oscar nominations: Hunt Stromberg (best picture), W.S. Van Dyke (director), Frances Goodrich, (screenplay), Albert Hackett (screenplay), William Powell (actor)
The chemistry between Myrna Loy and William Powell was so potent in the 1934 film Manhattan Melodrama that its director, W.S. Van Dyke, cast the two again in the same year. As Nick and Nora Charles, they are unique in the history of cinema. The first popular husband-and-wife detective team, they not only love each other, they like each other, too, without being insipid, disrespectful, or dull.
The Thin Mans plot is a messy one. Nick Charles is officially a retired detective but he takes a personal interest in the disappearance of a crotchety inventorthe thin man of the titlewhose daughter (Maureen OSullivan) is Nicks long-time acquaintance. The inventors safety is thrown into further doubt when complications arise involving his suspicious mistress, grasping ex-wife, and her money-hungry husband (Cesar Romero). With the addition of multifarious mobsters, cops, and molls, it seems the whole criminal world turns up at the Charless luxurious hotel suite at one time or another.