It Happened One Night

DVD review from The Movie Snob

It Happened One Night (B). I got "The Premiere Frank Capra Collection" on DVD as a gift, and I decided to watch this movie, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, first. It wasn't bad. Colbert plays spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews, who has defied her wealthy father by getting married before a justice of the peace to a man she hardly knows. She escapes from her father's yacht in Florida and tries to make her way back to her husband in New York. On the way she falls in with down-on-his-luck newspaperman Peter Warne (Gable). He quickly figures out who she is and agrees to help her avoid her father's detectives and get back to New York if he can publish her story. Made in 1934, it is certainly an old-fashioned picture, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless. Remarkably, it won the Oscars for best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay, a feat not duplicated until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.