Review: It Happened One Night 1934
Review: It Happened One Night
This 1934 review is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that the sheer expectations for this film were quite low, that it belonged to a fad topic (a public transportation romance movie, a sub-genre at a time when public transportation in the United States has blossomed and was being used by more people than ever, and the technology of it was of fascination). Secondarily, that the film was coming from a film studio (Columbia) not known for first class entertainment, and thirdly, that the relatively unknown Frank Capra was helming the effort.
Excerpted from the review:
The New Republic, May 9, 1934 (Their web site here)
It is a little late in the day for mention of It Happened One Night, but since the picture is still floating around the little houses and since it would be a pity to miss it, I should like to plump for it here, and strongly. Considering its subject, it is better than it has any right to be - better acted, better directed, better written.
The plot has to do with a girl who escapes the rigors of life on her father's yacht and takes a long-distance bus for New York, where she proposes to join a villain she has just married. She runs into a fired newspaperman who at first is rather hard on her but soon turns out to be a very number-one sort of chap indeed, and everything runs along nicely until the two have surmounted about everything and are nearly home. But then, everybody being in love with everybody else in pleasantly conclusive fashion, there enters more confusion as to who loves whom and why...
...The cast was particularly sound from top to bottom. Claudette Colbert sensed what was required of her, and did it very well, though I do not care for her much as a person-not as much in fact as for Walter Connolly, who was delightful. Clark Gable was the outstanding feature, managing to be a rowdy and a perfect gentle-man and a newspaperman and a young lover, all in the same breath and the most breezy and convincing manner imaginable.
... I am reminded that such a picture cannot be defined at all until we find a way of describing whatever it is that makes first-rate entertainment what it is.
[Our page on It Happened One Night with complete credits is here]
A 1935 review of the film is here
Original page 2007 | Updated Oct 2019
