| Dan McCabe |
Frank Capra accepts the 1935 Academy Award for Best Director for It Happened One Night (1934). The story leading up to this triumphant moment is one of Hollywood legend (From the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).
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.
Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, had a problem. Director Frank Capra, arguably the person keeping the lights on at Columbia, had a great script based on a popular short story. The issue? Directors and scripts didn’t sell movies during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Stars did, and Columbia didn’t have any.
Across town at MGM, Louis B. Mayer had a different problem. MGM’s newest star, Clark Gable, caused all kinds of trouble on the set of Dancing Lady (1933), feigning illness to get out of shooting several scenes.1 Worse than that, he had asked for more money.2 Louis B. Mayer didn’t become the most powerful man in Hollywood by letting young actors act out on set or push him around. This Gable fellow needed a lesson about who ran the show at the dream factory in Culver City.
It Happened One Night is based on the 1933 short story The Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Here is a shot from the film that stands as a reference to the title of the source material.
Meanwhile, Cohn had shopped Capra’s project around town for weeks, trying to get someone, anyone, to star in it. Capra wanted Robert Montgomery to star, but he turned it down.3 The female lead proved even more difficult to cast. Miriam Hopkins, Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullivan, Carole Lombard, and Loretta Young all turned it down. Cohn was ready to cancel the film when he received a call from Louis B. Mayer.
Decades later, Frank Capra told the American Film Institute that the exchange went like this:4
MAYER
Herschel, I got a man for you to play that megillah in that film you couldn’t get off the ground.
COHN
Oh, the hell with it. We’re calling it off.
MAYER
Oh, no. I’ve got a man here who’s been a bad boy, and I’d like to punish him.
The man that Mayer wanted to punish, of course, was Clark Gable. At this point, Gable had proven himself a bankable star opposite some of the top leading actresses of the day like Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow, but he had not yet established himself as “the King of Hollywood.” Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Gone with the Wind (1939), and his other well-known roles still lay in the future. If Greta Garbo, for example, had called in with a fake illness or asked for a raise, Mayer would have grumbled, but relented. For an up-and-comer? It was Siberia for him, Siberia being Columbia pictures. That is how Clark Gable came to play Peter Warne.
So, Capra got his leading man. As for a leading lady to play runaway heiress Ellie Andrews, it seemed that half of Hollywood had rejected the part. Enter Claudette Colbert, an established star whose contract with Paramount allowed her to take roles for other studios. At the right price, of course. Columbia paid Colbert a significant amount of money to play Andrews,5 and agreed to keep a tight shooting schedule to accommodate her busy schedule.
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, sharing a set together after some reluctance.
Frank Capra had his stars, and his script. The next problem? One of the stars and the script didn’t see eye to eye. Was it Clark Gable, who had just gotten temporarily exiled from MGM for misbehavior on set? Not him. Capra said, “He fell in love with the picture right off the bat. Really, that’s the only picture that Gable ever played himself. He was that character and he loved doing those scenes.”6 Instead, Claudette Colbert, she of the mighty salary and shooting schedule demands, absolutely loathed working on It Happened One Night.
It was out of character for Colbert to openly dislike a production she worked on. She was a pro’s pro. Her agent Lloyd Rigler described her as the kind of actor who brought her own lunch to set, and “a very gracious lady.”7 Perhaps, she resented working on a “poverty row” picture, or just didn’t like Capra’s auteur directing style. Whatever her issue, she complained about the script from day one.
Perhaps the most famous scene in the film, where Colbert lifts her dress and exposes her leg to hitchhike, almost didn’t happen. Colbert had her share of sultry scenes in the pre-code days. Most notably in Cecil B. DeMille’s Sign of the Cross (1932), her character bathes nude in a tub of donkey’s milk. But for some reason, she thought that the hitchhiking scene in It Happened One Night was tawdry. Capra hired a chorus girl as a body double. Legend has it that Colbert was so insulted that someone else’s leg would be substituted for hers that she demanded to do the scene herself.
You wouldn’t know it from this shot, but Claudette Colbert was miserable the entire time while shooting It Happened One Night.
Filming wrapped in 1933, on-time and on-budget. After filming ended, Colbert is said to have told friends that she had finished the worst movie of her career.
Columbia released It Happened One Night on February 22, 1934 to strong reviews. By the end of the year, it had become a cultural sensation, and the fourth highest grossing film of the year. Legend has it that men’s undershirt sales dropped precipitously due to a scene where Gable takes off his shirt to reveal that he wasn’t wearing one.8
The film’s commercial success showed that Columbia could compete with the major studios, but its real watershed came at the seventh Academy Awards in 1935. Keep in mind that at this point in history, the Oscars had been around for less than a decade. According to the Hollywood legend, the Academy was Louis B. Mayer’s idea, and they quickly became a showcase to promote the films of the big five Hollywood studios (MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO, and Fox). Most of the Best Picture nominees in the first six award ceremonies came from these studios.
While one of Capra’s earlier films had earned a best picture nomination the year before (Lady for a Day (1933)), the 1935 Academy Awards solidified his reputation as one of the top directors in the industry. He won his first of three Best Director Oscars that night, and would go one to direct some of the most influential and beloved American films such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
Clark Gable won his only Oscar, which seems strange to think about given how popular of a movie star he became. Only Greta Garbo at the height of her powers commanded a bigger marquee than Gable did at the peak of his popularity.9 Between 1934 and his death in 1960, Gable would not fall out of the public eye or lose his status as a bankable movie star.
Claudette Colbert accepts her only Oscar in 1935, from fellow Hollywood superstar Shirley Temple. (From the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).
Claudette Colbert almost didn’t accept her Oscar for It Happened One Night. Despite the film’s commercial success, Colbert booked a train ticket to leave Los Angeles the night of the 1935 Academy Awards. Legend has it that Harry Cohn himself brought her from the train station, but that seems more Hollywood legend than fact. When Shirley Temple presented Colbert with the only Oscar of her career, Colbert was still holding her coat, having come directly from the train station. Colbert would go on to have a legendary career in Hollywood, on Broadway, and on television until her retirement in 1987.
Only three films have won Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay: It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The clean sweep in 1935 put Columbia on the map as a major studio, an honorific it still enjoys today as the main marquee of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Harry Cohn considered the triumph a personal victory, although he had little to do with the production itself.10
The story of It Happened One Night could have made a great Capra film itself. His films often had an everyman character succeeding against great odds. It’s not the best making-of story; that will forever belong to Marcel Carné’s 1945 tour de force Children of Paradise.11 That said, its backstory is up there with films like Rocky (1977) and Home Alone (1990), movies that succeeded despite storied challenges during production.
What strikes me most about It Happened One Night isn’t the triumphant story of its making, but the fact that, ninety-two years later, it’s still funny. Comedy is notoriously one of the hardest genres to connect across the generations, but I challenge anyone not to laugh when you see the look on Claudette Colbert’s face at certain points of the film that I’m not going to spoil. Sometimes, lightning does strike, and a great film still resonates decades after it wrapped production.
Footnotes
1 Hay, Peter, MGM: When the Lion Roars (Turner Publishing, 1991) p. 101.
2 Ibid, p. 119.
3 Stevens, Jr., George, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) p. 99.
4 Stevens, Jr., p. 99.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Zollo, Paul, Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of its Golden Age (First Cooper Square Press, 2002) p. 87.
8 Hay, p. 106.
9 Greta Garbo’s films often advertised her last name in giant, block letters, and the title of the film with smaller letters underneath. Sometimes, theater marquees only read “GARBO.”
10 Hammond, Gregory, The History of Columbia Pictures, A Hollywood Company (Historia Magna, 2025) p. 15.
11 Children of Paradise was filmed between two cities in occupied France at the height of World War II. The production doubled as a front for the French Resistance. They say not a day goes by in Paris without a showing of the film.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon