My mother loved Clark Gable. One of the saddest days of her life came when Gable died in 1960.
While she adored Gable's performance as Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind," the 1934 romantic comedy "It Happened One Night" was her favorite Gable movie.
Frank Capra's influential film starring Gable and Claudette Colbert appeared in February 1934, the depths of the Depression. The Guardian's Jesse Hassenger wrote an insightful 90th anniversary appreciation of "It Happened One Night," which swept the Academy Awards.
My mother, whom I always thought resembled Colbert, introduced me to the film, one of my all-time favorites.
Gable plays Peter, a wise-cracking newspaperman who ends up making a cross-country trip with Colbert's Ellie, a pampered heiress who escapes to Florida from the Northeast to avoid marrying a wealthy scion chosen by her father. Her escape draws national media attention, especially from tabloid newspapers.
Fired from his newspaper job after defying his editor, Peter tracks down Ellie so that he can write and sell a magazine article about her. She decides to return home to carry out her father's wishes, and they travel together, slowly falling in love.
Wearing stylish suits and a hip fedora, Gable portrays Peter as a cocky American tough guy with an underlying soft heart. Spoiled and sheltered since childhood, Ellie exhibits a flirty, teasing personality and discovers an inner resolve as they deal with obstacles on the road and she falls for Peter.
Capra created some of the most memorable moments in American cinema, including Gable and Colbert's celebrated hitch-hiking scene. After Peter fails in his worldly wise efforts to secure a ride, Ellie persuades a driver to stop by pulling her skirt above her thigh. Her unexpected seductive gesture still gives an erotic charge.
In another classic scene, Colbert and Gable join passengers riding on a cross-country bus in a sing-along of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze." Reflecting American resolve and camaraderie during the Depression, the scene always amazes me when I see it on"YouTube."
The black and white classic gives Capra's vision of American communal spirit overcoming class differences and economic despair.
Gable and Colbert's wit and beauty still sparkle 90 years later.
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