GROSS/24 1934 - money, sex and class in the Great Depression
Frank Capra has entered the timeline. He brings with him his cast of lovable, hard-working Americans and eccentric millionaires.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, FRANK CAPRA, COLUMBIA PICTURES, 1934, 105 MINUTES. CLAUDETTE COLBERT, CLARK GABLE, WALTER CONNOLLY
I’m going to give you my notes for this one. Complaints at the complaints window, please.
We’re flying now - the thirties are half over. We’ve got to the creamy, fine-grained, photography and deliciously-recorded audio of another golden age. And our first screwball comedy.
This film is an artefact of the Great Depression in America, like Dorothea Lange’s photographs or The Grapes of Wrath or the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And It Happened One Night is another big pivot - the top-grossing film of 1934, the first comedy to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards (it was a clean sweep - there wouldn’t be another one for forty years). Comedies weren’t supposed to do this - the studios started to pay attention, the money came in and the 1930s became a golden age for grown-up movie comedy.
It Happened One Night is 100% screwball - not quite the first one (that was probably another Colbert movie from the previous year) but it’s the first really big one.
In screwball you get a man and a woman pressed together in scenarios that produce frenetic comedy (see also: Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday). There’s usually a class element and sometimes someone dresses up or wears a disguise. Stories can be brought to life by sex - although of the decorous, hinted-at kind. Women are eccentric in a way that’s not allowed in the other genres. Men can be stupid and emotional and loveable.
An ill-advised marriage
Ellie (Claudette Colbert) runs away from her over-protective, plutocrat father (Walter Connolly), diving from his yacht moored by Miami Beach. The old man sicks every private dick on the East coast on her - a $10,000 reward is offered. She’s fleeing to be with her new husband (Jameson Thomas) - of whom no one approves - in New York and she must be stopped.
This husband, with whom Ellie has recently eloped - hence the scandal - doesn’t feature much. He’s a a ‘fortune-hunter’, which is the male version of a gold-digger, but in the story he’s a cipher - sitting out of shot and exerting some pressure on the narrative. Ellie doesn’t care what people think, though, and takes a Greyhound bus to avoid the Pinkerton detectives (they’re called Lovingtons in this story).
Ellie meets Peter Warner (Clark Gable), recently-fired newshound, on the road North. They fall in love, but it’s the prickly, badly-communicated love of the screwball comedy. They’re travelling hopefully, like millions of other Americans in this period, and they’re broke (although for Ellie, of course, it’s only temporary, for the story).
They take the bus, hitch-hike and steal a car; they sleep in a barn and in ‘Auto Camps’ (the kind of simple roadside accommodation that evolved into the Motel - but that’s another story).
We’re fully in Capra territory. We see poverty - it’s 1934 , it’s everywhere - but there’s no bitterness or militance. It’s hard work, self-reliance, get-up-and-go. Working people in this movie are humble, down-home, unpretentious people. They’re generous, careful and moral.
The workers are contrasted throughout with the rich but the rich aren’t wicked, they’re just different. In fact, the best person in the film turns out to be the plutocrat himself, the provider of the wealth that underwrites everything (and later of the permission that Ellie needs to love without reservation).
On the road
It’s the journey that provides most of the joy in this film - it’s a road-trip along the whole East Coast. On the Greyhound bus we’re entertained by a tapestry cast of working class Americans - sailors, travelling salesmen, a mother travelling to find work with her little boy.
There’s a blissful sing-along, accompanied on guitar and fiddle, and passengers contribute verses to The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze - Ellie and Peter just soak it up, laughing, joining in. On the bus there’s generosity, love for others, fellow-feeling, a suspension of hierarchy. It’s Capra’s ideal America.
He gives us dozens of these characters. In an early scene Ellie joins a line of women waiting for the only bathroom at an Auto Camp. Women in cheap dresses with messy, morning hair. Grafters on the way somewhere for work. They remind Ellie she has no precedence here - she must go to the back of the line. We love these characters.
There’s one black character in the whole film. Of course black people were present in these hard-hit depression locations but we meet only a rest-stop hotdog seller. This is the simple racism of the pre-civil rights era but it’s also Capra’s instinctive avoidance of social tension. He keeps the interactions one-dimensional so his audience can laugh uncomplicatedly.
Market morality
Later Peter steals a car (is it a Model-T Ford, the original people’s car?). This is only okay because he stole it from a thief. Nowhere else is dishonesty tolerated. All bills are settled in full. Peter doesn’t borrow or steal money for food and gas, he sells his Fedora, his coat, his suitcase. When he sells Ellie’s story to his old editor for a vast $1,000 and then it doesn’t work out, he returns the money, in full.
He makes a financial claim on Ellie’s banker father but it’s not for the $10,000 reward, just for the money he spent getting her to New York - a precisely accounted-for $34.60). Capra loves these little money stories. I should make a list of the financial transactions in It Happened One Night. They obviously say something about the morality of the market for him.
Peter is held up at a level-crossing in the Model-T. While he waits he waves joyfully to the hobos riding the box cars - they wave back, also joyfully. The film is full of these moments of relief from poverty and stress. Brilliant and funny Capra can be sickly (in It’s A Wonderful Life, for instance, I suggest respectfully) but here it’s simpler and happier.
The hitchhiking scene is the funniest thing Clark Gable ever did. Everyone remembers Colbert’s leg but it’s Gable’s thumb that animates this skit. I’m a Gable sceptic but this is precious stuff. I love him for this.
By the time we get to the wedding in the grounds of the banker’s big house (and the fortune-hunter’s stupid gyrocopter) we’re convinced the rich are just as dumb as the rest of us but we also learn they can be loving and spontaneous. It’s Ellie’s millionaire dad who pushes her to dump the schlub at the alter and follow her heart with Peter. He even arranges a get-away car (and, because he’s a big deal, an annulment!) and laughs himself silly as all assembled lose their shit.
There’s a lovely 4K version on Amazon Prime. And a Criterion Blu-Ray, although it seems to be unavailable.
Movie history is a blur, right? How can we be watching films from the Great Depression? Isn’t that ancient history? Like the Roman Empire, or the Middle Ages. It’s closer than you think, though, although only just within living memory - my parents were born in this depression. Their lives were scarred by it. It’s with us now.
In the movies - especially in Hollywood - transport is a critical indicator of class. The fugitives take the bus while banker dad flies overhead in his private plane, and we see Ellie, blissful, in her bed at the Auto Camp, quickly adapting to the simple life of the ordinary people around her, and we hear dad’s plane, far overhead, an unhappy commentary on Ellie’s new priorities.
David Thomson, who was a big critic of Capra, says the class angle is vital, here as in other depression comedies: “…the early sound comedies were very often pictures about the rich or the faux rich. It Happened One Night smelled like a news story—it need not have been a comedy—in which the class distinctions of America were bridged as a newspaperman met an heiress, and proved smarter than she was. In other words, it was a comedy that spoke up for the common sense, the wit, the ingenuity, and the romantic readiness of the ordinary man.”
Google ‘Frank Capra Politics’ and you’ll find plenty of writing about the man and his beliefs. A million undergraduate theses about his reactionary populism, his authoritarianism, his anti-authoritarianism. He seems to stand for what’s best and what’s worst about the movies, depending on who you ask. He was certainly a nasty piece of work, a fabulist and an informer. Thomson says “…the films, it seems to me, are a kind of fascistic inspirationalism in which the true daily, tedious difficulty of being American is exploded in the proposed rediscovery of simple goodness.” Writing before Trump, he compares Capra’s later political films to ‘a Ross Perot rally’. In the earlier films, though, like this one, you could easily mistake the director for a new-dealer, even a little bit Popular Front. Confusion about Capra’s intentions was widespread - the FBI thought he might be a Communist.
Nice round-up of Capra’s ‘10 essential movies’ on the BFI website.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.