Review: It Happened One Night 1935
Review: It Happened One Night
The Nation, April 10, 1935 (Their web site here)
This particular reviewer seems dumbfounded to figure out what it is about the film which makes it work so well when the componant parts are not something new in motion pictures and shouldn't produce the overall effect. A note is made on Capra keeping the tempo of the film firmly under control.
By William Troy
Among the more gratifying phenomena of the current season has been the growing recognition of It Happened One Night, the Frank Capra production of last year, as one of the few potential classics of the recent cinema.
Having been selected as the best American picture of the year by the National Board of Review and other organizations, and having earned for its director and players a handsome collection of gold medals, it is at the moment in its third week of revival at a New York playhouse – a tribute usually reserved for certain films of Chaplin and certain cartoons by Walt Disney...
... There had been a whole succession of pictures based on the picaresque aspects of the cross-country bus; neither Claudette Colbert nor Clark Gable was a reigning favorite with the great popular public; and Frank Capra was merely one of several better than average Hollywood directors. In brief, the wholly spontaneous response with which the picture was received could be traced to no novelty or originality in its component elements...
...it is hard to distinguish between the work of the scriptwriters and the work of the director, who is perhaps even more responsible for maintaining an unerring accuracy of tempo throughout. And is it quite fair to ignore what the players may be contributing to the same effect? Although neither Miss Colbert nor Mr. Gable had demonstrated any particular comic talent before this picture, their playing here is at every step exactly in tune with the mood of the occasion.
...the effort to fix and label the particular quality which separates this film from the dozen or more substantially like it in recent years is bound to end only in an admission of critical humiliation.
A good photoplay, like a good book or a good piece of music, remains always something of a miracle-in the least sentimental sense of that word. Beyond a certain point the mind is forced to bow down before its own inability to unravel and put together again all the parts of the shining and imponderable whole with which it is dealing.
[Our page on It Happened One Night with complete credits is here]
Original page 2007 | Updated April 2013
