Best Actress: Claudette Colbert
Hey Jess, you want some space to talk about one of your favourite movies of all time? Oh yeah, sure, I'll go get the soapbox!
In my opinion, It Happened One Night is required viewing for anyone who wants to watch more old movies, learn about old Hollywood, or gain an appreciation for movies in general. It's the first movie to sweep all the big categories at the Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay; it's a perfect screwball comedy, and really, should be considered representative of the genre (in my opinion).
While the story is great and the directing phenomenal (Frank Capra, winning the first of his many directing Oscars), the success of It Happened One Night boils down to Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.
In It Happened One Night, Claudette plays Ellie, a spoiled heiress who's married a playboy aviator her father disapproves of. Rather than annul the marriage, she runs away and tries to get back to New York before her father can find her. Cue: the bus, and Clark, playing Peter, a recently-fired newspaperman, is the straight-man reluctantly helping her but also trying to get the scoop.
From Florida to New York, Claudette and Clark find themselves in zany situations. The bridge is washed out and they spend the night in a motor lodge (where Clark Gable singlehandedly destroyed the undershirt business). A talkative passenger discovers Ellie's true identity and they have to run off into the night and hitchhike part of the way (you've seen this scene, surely, or at least an homage to it). Through all the ups and downs, they fall in love, but it wouldn't be a screwball comedy if there wasn't a little bit of madcappery to keep them apart until the end scene!
Claudette specialized in playing cosmopolitan heiresses and high society women with heart and spunk. I don't think I've ever had a bad time watching Claudette in a movie (but I'm proud in my hatred of the Fred MacMurray love interests she was often paired with. His characters were always so buffoonish and awful to her!), to the point that I think I'd want to live in one of her comedies, if I could.
I wrote in that linked post: "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."
Clark Gable was more than adept as Claudette's partner in this film. Their chemistry is off the charts once they do start falling in love, but even when their relationship is adversarial at the beginning, my God, you don't want them to stop!
And the funniest part? Neither of them wanted to make It Happened One Night! Columbia Pictures didn't have the best reputation back then, and they both viewed it as beneath them to be loaned out for this film. But whatever stars aligned to get Claudette, Clark and Capra together to make this, thank you.
One of the funniest aspects of the Oscar season in 1934 is that when the Best Actress nominees were announced—Claudette, Grace Moore (One Night of Love), and Norma Shearer (The Barretts of Wimpole Street)—the trades blew up at a snub. Bette Davis, who'd starred in Of Human Bondage, hadn't been nominated! The Academy would allow write-ins for that category, but ultimately, there wasn't enough support for Bette, and Claudette won the Oscar.
I say funny because Claudette was so convinced that Bette would win based on the backlash and the calls for a write-in winner that she didn't even attend the ceremony! She had a vacation scheduled and she was determined to go on it, goddammit. But then they announced her name and some studio flunkies were tasked with retrieving Claudette from the train station, and thus, she's the first (and so far only) winner to accept her Oscar in a travelling suit. From Shirley Temple, no less!
Finally, let's end on a controversial opinion that I'll have to pick up in the next entry in this series: Claudette deserved to win the Oscar over Bette; I don't see the fuss, personally, at Of Human Bondage, but we'll get into that next time, when the first Best Actress 'consolation Oscar' was awarded to Bette for Dangerous.
DID I LIKE IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT? Is the sun hot? Of course I did! Top 10 for sure!*
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Did you like It Happened One Night? What are your thoughts on Claudette Colbert's Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
*Let's see if this statement comes back to haunt me later!
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