| Jackson Stern |
It Happened One Night plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, September 13th, through Tuesday, September 15th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
As a young man, I loved a good romance.
Two people walking alone until, usually without warning, they’re cosmically entwined forever under a setting sun. It’s a pretty picture to see, especially when it features two unmistakably beautiful people whose smiles melt your insides and whose effortless strolls produce trails of stardust.
I saw it all a hundred times on screen and it never once bored me. Except then, well, it sort of did.
Sometime during COVID, these great celluloid romances didn’t have the relevance they once did, or, at any rate, I didn’t feel them nearly as intensely. Those blue electric sparks I once found in Chaplin’s best or in When Harry Met Sally, An Affair to Remember, and City Girl didn’t hit in the same deep place as the more critical stuff I was discovering. It was here when I was discovering Visconti, digging deeper into Bergman and early Akerman, and becoming more comfortable with Béla Tarr’s world under ashfall. Cary Grant’s fumbling around Katherine Hepburn didn’t feel as prescient as Gena Rowlands’s punctured distress, so I put the seemingly lighter stuff on the backburner for a little while.
A few full calendars later, it’s just as easy, if not even more so, to overlook the nuances of a straight-forward romance. But when I recently revisited It Happened One Night, Frank Capra’s seminal, five-time Oscar-winning classic, I found myself rethinking this oversight.
From the first, most fundamental description, this is a film of archetypes, clichés, and banter. The set-up is classic: she’s a somewhat spoiled but resourceful heiress while he’s a snarky, world-weary newspaperman. They both seem to have a pulsing heart to be unearthed and as the film goes along, they manage to fish it out of one another. Opposites attract rather quickly and despite the physical, societal, economic, and sexual factors between them, love prevails in the end.
So far, the cynic in me is unimpressed and uninspired from these descriptions but once he actually takes a look at the thing, its foundational status comes into focus rather quickly and he’s sitting on the floor cross-legged, staring at the monochrome screen, smiling like a fool. All that romantic contemplation of my youth flooded back at once, overwhelmed me, and left me wishing for nothing more than to get all that feeling back, if such a thing is possible.
But then I thought to myself: “Is that yearning for a time in my life where those gooey, vulnerable feelings were easier to come by something to be avoided or embraced?” Is the wish for the dreams of yesterday a necessary comfort to get through today in search of tomorrow or another symptom of the rampant conservatism so many people are obsessed with championing, this pining for a “simpler” period when the sky was apparently bluer and the bills were apparently easier to pay? Do Frank Capra’s idealistic yarns cause us more harm than good, set us up for a false expectation around the idea that love can save us and that everyone, even the rich, have an inherent good in them just waiting to be squeezed out?
To these questions, I have very few answers. As anyone with half an educated brain can tell you, our information age and its moral consequences has hardened and cynicized us to the point where a film like this, whose characters act so altruistically, has all the marks of pure fantasy. I mean when’s the last time you heard of a rich man unequivocally caring about his daughter’s personal happiness? How about an editor of a major regional newspaper who’s truly concerned for the romantic and financial well-being of one of his writers (talk about fiction)? It all reeks of a bygone idealism that perhaps never existed beyond the manufactured walls of a soundstage.
In spite of all that, we swoon while we watch it. We feel pits in the bottoms of our stomachs when Peter *almost* kisses Ellie atop a moonlit haystack and a smolder in the tops of our hearts when Ellie runs out on her husband-to-be, in search of a downtrodden Peter. Unlike most films in the romantic comedy genre (which this was indisputably the harbinger of), we welcome their embrace as if it were our own.
Most of that’s due to charm. Gable, at least when isolated to this performance, could sell a ditch digger their own shovel with his toothless smile alone and Colbert’s naturalistic manner of speaking sounds like a gentle incantation from a golden age far removed from our own. Not to mention how they play just as well off each other as they do the audience. Their bickering banter rarely, if ever, feels overbearing or cruel, and the quietest moments between them often speak the most of their developing attraction. It’s impossible to pick a favorite scene in a film full of classic ones but there’s a particular moment in which the lead duo parody domesticity in an attempt to displace a couple of detectives is a real riot; putting on an act so purely and with such love for the other’s improvisations that they must be made for each other.
Yet the reason for the film’s resilience could also be because it does the work. Capra was known for cutting with a rhythmic efficiency but there are many moments in here I can’t imagine would make the final cut in a film like this today. I think of Ellie’s long trek to the showers or the extended musical sequence that sees a bus full of strangers coming together in song. That latter scene could have easily been seen as overly schmaltzy in that way Capra has been criticized for, but the naturalism that surrounds it renders the scene as one of those moments of such communal joy that you thank whatever you believe in for being a human. I mean, just the other week I was walking in downtown Chicago and a large circle of pedestrians stood around a break-dancing troop. Everyone smiled and cheered them on and in that moment, I knew that not a single person in that crowd of people felt estranged. Perhaps idealistic scenes like this do ring some truth about us which is so fundamental, at least in the right circumstances, that even the most cynical among us might just stop and smile.
Or perhaps not. But at the very least, the film has enough beautiful images, vulnerability, and good humor to win over even the darkest of hearts, even if just for a little while. There are, of course, always things to be concerned about, angry about, and conflicted about, but a love like this shouldn’t be one of them. Not to me, at least.
After all, as a grown man, I love a good romance.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon