It Happened One Night

Its most famous prop is a blanket, and its star endorsement was that real men do not wear undershirts. The humble and even corny touchstones of Frank Capra s Academy–Award winning 1934 comedy It Happened One Night belie its power and consequential status in the history of classic Hollywood cinema. Likewise, the simple blanket and missing undershirt suggest both the gritty materiality and social enormity of what is at stake––bedding and skin, class and sex––in this film set in Depression–era America.

This book–length treatment of It Happened One Night draws on its critical heritage as well as its multiple historical contexts so that students can best appreciate this film s textual, historical, cultural, and generic dimensions. Focus points will be the issues and topics which provoke in students strong contradictory responses to this film. Students immediately recognize and enjoy this screwball comedy′s familiarity, most obviously from the romantic comedy films they know. The volume is especially helpful because it also helps students identify the structures the film shares with fairy tales and Shakespearean comedy, so they can be persuaded that some of the film s pleasures can be understood with formalist and structuralist theories.

Through mad–cap action, spunky heroines, gender politics, and class/gender conflicts, It Happened One Night invites discussion of film history, the studio system, and the problems posed by sound cinema for early–1930s censorship codes.

List of Illustrations.

Acknowledgments

.Introduction: Little Picture, Big Classic.

Legends and a Legendary Hit.

Adaptation: "Night Bus" to Sleeper Hit.

Capra and Authorship.

1. Rules and Unruliness: Romantic Comedy.

Gender and Genre.

Screwball Characters Meet Cute.

Intimacy, Violence, and Marriage.

2. Sex and Censorship: The Wavering Walls of Jericho.

The Hays Office and the Production Code.

Censorship and the Power of "It".

Constructing the Walls of Jericho.

The Walls Tumble Down.

3. Capra, Class, and the Runaway Heiress.

Hollywood and the Great Depression.

The Runaway Heiress.

Capra and Class Politics.

4. Stardom: Shirtless Gable, Classy Colbert.

Cave Man and a Menace to Morals.

"Who Do You Think You Are? Clark Gable?"

Tough Dame, Lovely Frog.

The Runaway Bride.

Notes.

Works Cited.

Index.

Linda Mizejewski is a Professor of Women s Studies at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, 1992), Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Duke, 1999), and Hardboiled & High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004), as well as the author of numerous essays and a teaching manual for Making Sense of Movies ( McGraw Hill, 2002). Mizejewski has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2004 she was the winner of Ohio State University s Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

"Filled with clearly explained theory, it is an exemplary guide for film students and teachers. Its shrewd reading of the film empowers the text; the meticulous research and subtle analysis is sophisticated enough for high level readers yet accessible enough for those new to the field. ... This book is not just for lovers of Capra, Gable, or even ′old films′ the concepts of gender, class, stardom, and censorship developed in this text are pertinent for any film buff." ( M/C Reviews, April 2010)