301 - It Happened One Night, United States, 1934. Dir. Frank Capra.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

301 - It Happened One Night, United States, 1934.  Dir. Frank Capra.

Frank Capra casually picked up a Cosmopolitan magazine while waiting in the lobby of a doctor's office or barbershop, and he read an article, "Night Bus," about a rich heiress who fled the restraints of her family.

He went to his boss at Columbia and asked them to buy the story.  His boss agreed and they did.  At the time Columbia was a Poverty Row studio.  It did not have the resources or the prestige of an MGM, Warner Bros., or Paramount.  But the previous year it had received its first Academy nominations with Capra's picture Lady for a Day, so studio chief Harry Cohn was hungry for more, and Frank Capra had some clout.

Frank Capra was a workman's director who had been in the industry a little over a decade.  He was not widely known in America.  He had not yet made any of the classics for which he would later be known.  His credits included titles such as Long Pants (1927), For the Love of Mike (1927), and Say It With Sables (1928).

Are those films in your rotation?  I did not think so.

OK, to be fair, he had also made Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), and Lady for a Day (1933).  If you are a film buff, you may be familiar with those titles.  However, I suspect the majority of my readers have never heard of any of them.

Capra went looking for a leading lady.  He approached Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullivan, Miriam Hopkins, and Loretta Young.  All of them turned it down.  He approached Robert Montgomery to play the leading man.  He too turned it down.

Claudette Colbert was not too thrilled about this project either.  She had worked with Capra on that great hit I mentioned above, For the Love of Mike, and it was a colossal flop.  It was now six years later, and she was a Paramount star.  She was none too excited about being loaned out to a Poverty Row studio for another failure.  Furthermore, she only had a four-week availability window before her vacation at Sun Valley, and she intended to make her vacation.  So she quoted her weekly rate to Capra and then demanded double.  This would get rid of him.  He reported it to Cohn, and Cohn said yes.  The Poverty Row studio was willing to pay double the rate of a major studio to get one of their stars for a month.  As we said, Harry Cohn was hungry.

Meanwhile, Clark Gable was with MGM.  Of course.  Louis B. Mayer was more than willing to loan him out to Columbia.  He had to pay him his weekly rate anyway, and Gable had nothing on his calendar, so Mayer might as well get something in return for it.

Now Frank Capra was in a bind, a bind for which he willing sign up.  He had to make a motion picture in four weeks.  Four weeks!

That sounds like independent movie making today, using digital cameras.  But this was a Hollywood studio in the early 1930s.  How would they pull it off?

Capra went on location.

Sound had started to influence film technology in such a way that directors could go out more on location.  Cameras were lighter and more portable.  Rather than building sets on a sound stage, a director could go on location to save time and money.

Capra did build a couple of sets.  He built a set of the bus, which could be jostled, and with process screens out the windows.  And he built a set of a motor court, which he reused for each of the places the couple would stop during the film.

Claudette Colbert did her duty without pleasure.  She was looking forward to that vacation, and she was not thrilled with the conditions under which she was expected to work.  When it was over she told her friends that she had just made the worst movie of her career.

At least it was over.

She could move on.

Then the movie was released.  People went to see it.  They returned with their friends.  They too returned and they too brought their friends.  It spread across America like wildfire.

By the time the Academy Awards came around it became the first movie in history to win all five major awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress.  This would not happen again for 41 more years, until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  When they opened the envelopes they began to read the Winner and the audience finished the title for them.

The movie made so much money that it alone propelled Columbia Pictures from being a Poverty Row studio to being a major.

The chemistry between Gable and Colbert is extraordinary.  They are both strong and both vulnerable in their respective ways, and their characters genuinely love one another.

It Happened One Night happens over several nights and a few days, and when you watch it, it may happen for you.