Why I Want to be a Claudette Colbert Character
Can someone ship me off to Europe for a vacation—or a lifetime, if you're being generous—à la Claudette Colbert?
Because nobody loves life quite as much as a Claudette Colbert character in a screwball comedy. I think I could match this energy if given the chance, honestly. I'm brassy. I'm glamorous. I'm ready to risk it all on a whim and find love in the convoluted process.
And this is why I want to be a Claudette Colbert character.
The first time I ever saw Claudette Colbert it was in a film narrative class. We watched examples of the genres we studied, and It Happened One Night was the screwball comedy example. The rest was history. I sat there for nearly two hours totally enthralled by every frame of this movie: its script, its direction, its leading man (Clark Gable has never been as enjoyable, to me anyways, as he is in It Happened One Night. Fight me in the comments if you're so inclined), and its leading lady.
We're not supposed to root for the spoiled and impulsive Ellie Andrews, the willful heiress who's just gotten married to a fortune hunter she's trying to get back to while her father deploys nearly every form of capture as she goes on the lam from Florida to New York. But we do anyways, because despite the fact that she doesn't know how to stretch a dollar or guard her suitcase, or even to get back to the bus depot on time to make her connection, she's confident and she's fun. And ultimately, she just needs someone to match her wit and savvy.
She says things like, "I'll remember that when we need forty cars," when Peter insinuates that she should've taken off all her clothes instead of flashing a leg to hitch a ride; and "Well you've shown me an excellent example of the hiking part. When does the hitching come in?"
By the time she and Peter Warne make it back to New York, you can't help but want a happily ever after for her. You want the walls of Jerchio—the so-called bedsheet separating Peter and Ellie from carnal sin—to topple. You want her to run off into the sunset with Peter, forget King Westley (yes, that's his real name), and live happily ever after driving him absolutely nuts.
via incredibletales
In I Met Him in Paris, Claudette plays Kay Denham, an American fashion designer who's longed for a trip to Paris for years and finally gets it...and Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas, too. And don't forget Lee Bowman waiting for her back home—if only she'd definitively decide to marry him.
Nothing's going to stop Kay from enjoying every second of her trip. If that means she has to spend her time with the loquacious Gene (Robert Young) or the withdrawn (yet charming) George (Melvyn Douglas), she's going to do it. And when the party moves to Switzerland for some winter wonderland sports and games, guess who's booking a single car on the train? Kay.
To have scrimped and saved and decided that, come hell or high water, she's going to Paris and then to immediately change her mind because some sweet-talker's convinced her to run away to Switzerland and not even second guess her decision? That takes brass and honestly, may we all possess some of that confidence that when life gives us a split-second to make that kind of decision, we're able to decide to maybe not take the safe route and have that once-in-a-lifetime type of fun.
By the end of I Met Him in Paris, Kay's not at all convinced that she's in love with Gene, nor Berk, the boyfriend back home; she might be in love with George after all. She's practical and realistic (there is the matter of a not-yet-ex-wife in Gene's past to contend with) but she's willing to let fun things happen and to participate in her own life.
You know that when Kay tells everyone how she came to meet her husband and all that went into it—stray toboggan, ice dancing, and all—that it's going to be one heck of a story.
Do soulmates exist? Is true love real? It might be hard to believe in it when you're your fiancé's eighth bride, but that doesn't stop Nicole de Loiselle from saying "I do" to Gary Cooper's evergreen groom Michael Brandon.
Maybe Bluebeard's Eighth Wife isn't your bag (and I'm not entirely sure it's mine) but the premise that Nicole only marries Michael after securing $100,000 in alimony should they ever divorce and then proceeds to drive him to it by slapping him, biting him, and taking a big ole bite of green onions just before she kisses him. It doesn't hurt that David Niven turns up at the exact wrong minute and is presumed to be the man Nicole's cheating with, ultimately resulting in the longed for divorce.
After she's driven him sufficiently mad, she's ready to take him back: she's self-sufficient thanks to the alimony payments, so he'll never have to worry that she's a fortune hunter; and he's been cured of his need to constantly marry, so this time the marriage will stick! Happily ever after? Sure, but the real happily ever after is the love we found along the way.
Listen: I'd love to wake up some morning and decide that I'm going to pretend to be someone else, even when the overwhelming evidence is against me.
Maybe if I go to a Starbucks and claim the wrong drink, some handsome working class gent is going to play along despite his reservations, and some rich old fogey is going to keep the ruse going by funding my new lifestyle as this fake person.
Midnight is a fun movie because you just don't know how Claudette's Eve Peabody is going to keep the ruse going. She's always seconds away from discovery, but by hook or by crook—or by Don Ameche's or John Barrymore's intervention—she keeps on getting away with it.
Of course there's a happily ever after here—with the dashing Don Ameche—but there's still a lot of pratfalls to go through before she gets there: falsifying court documents, potential bigamy, definite identity theft and fraud all occur before she finally marries her Hungarian beau, but even though this brassy showgirl had to go through a whirlwind mixed up with Parisian socialites, you never stop rooting for her.
This is already going on quite long, but the facts remain: life is infinitely more fun when you're a Claudette Colbert character. If these examples haven't convinced you, consider The Palm Beach Story or It's a Wonderful World or The Bride Came Home or She Married Her Boss, and then meet me in the comments to let me know your thoughts!
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