It’s rare that a comedy wins the Oscar for Best Picture. You wouldn’t think a slight romantic farce about a runaway heiress and a down-and-out newspaperman would stand a chance. Oscars usually go to intensely dramatic films, especially those linked to major historical events like the Civil War (see Gone With the Wind), World War II (see Patton, The Bridge on the River Kwai, From Here to Eternity), and Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Platoon). Social problem movies like Gentleman’s Agreement and 12 Years a Slave also make for Oscar bait.
But in 1935 the five top Oscar categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) were filled by a quickly-made little picture called It Happened One Night. It wasn’t expected to be a hit. Robert Riskin’s script was turned down by many stars. Claudette Colbert, no fan of director Frank Capra, demanded that she receive twice her usual salary (that is to say $50,000) to play Ellie Andrews, and that shooting be finished in four weeks so she could go on a planned vacation. Male lead Clark Gable also had his doubts about the project. Fortunately, the film was a simple one to shoot (entirely on the Columbia lot and in the L.A. area), and interaction between Colbert and Gable turned out to be comedy gold.
To understand the accolades for It Happened One Night, it helps to look back on the Oscar ceremony for 1935, only the seventh time that the golden statuettes were presented to Hollywood’s finest. The stars and the moguls gathered in the ballroom of L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel to fête the winners. No fewer than 13 nominees vied for best picture. I’ll name a few: Flirtation Walk (starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in a romantic film about West Point cadets),The Gay Divorcee (an Astaire/Rogers musical), The Thin Man (first in a long series of comic mysteries), Viva Villa1 (a much-fictionalized biography of the Mexican revolutionary starring Wallace Beery). The ultra-serious prestige picture as top vote-getter was something Hollywood had clearly not yet discovered.
Frank Capra competed with only two other directors: Victor Schertzinger for One Night of Love and W.S. Van Dyke for The Thin Man. Clark Gable, who beautifully played a raffish reporter in It Happened One Night (and changed men’s sartorial habits overnight when he took off his shirt and revealed a bare chest), vied only with the always amusing William Powell (The Thin Man) and Frank Morgan, playing an Italian duke in The Affairs of Cellini. Colbert, as the headstrong heiress, had more competition: opera star Grace Moore for One Night of Love and Norma Shearer, playing the frail Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, along with a popular write-in candidate, Bette Davis as a slatternly waitress in Of Human Bondage. Colbert, who disliked her own film, was so sure she would lose that when the winner was announced she was boarding a train for a cross-country trip. Studio chief Harry Cohn immediately dispatched an underling to drag her off her train so she could appear at the ceremony. Though Colbert was quite cranky about the whole production experience, she’s delightful as the petulant Ellie—and it’s worth noting that she starred in three other films that same year, including two additional Best Picture nominees, the epic Cleopatra and the socially-conscious Imitation of Life. So maybe she really did need a vacation.
Why the film’s popularity? It’s fun, it’s fresh, and it comically addresses the inequities of the Depression era, with the common folk coming out on top. What’s not to love?
