‘It Happened One Night’ and the Case of the Curiously Modern Old Movies
What makes an old movie ‘timeless’? Pretty often it’s simple economics.
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OLDER films can often seem like they were conceived, written, and produced in an alien universe1. Sure, in some ways that seems obvious; a film released in 1934 will of course reflect a very different world. But that world wasn’t that different in a lot of aspects. I’m often struck, when reading older novels, at the similarities between the world 100 years ago and the world of today, at least in the United States. That’s why it’s usually trivially easy to adapt older stories to the modern day—there’s just not much that people can do today that people 100 years ago couldn’t do, just perhaps with a bit more effort2.
Every now and then you encounter an older film that somehow feels completely modern. Sure, the visuals give the game away—the clothes, the cars, the constant smoking3—but in most other ways a film that’s 75 or 100 years old just feels like it could have been released a few years ago, maybe with a few tweaks. It Happened One Night is one such film; released in 1934, it’s 90 years old and honestly if you ran it through an AI machine to colorize it and CGI the technology a bit, you could release it today and it would slam4.
Part of it is the film’s status as the Citizen Kane of romantic comedies; as smarter people have pointed out, just about every trope you find in modern romcoms can be traced back to this film, from the blanket divider in the bedroom to the runaway bride ending5. So many things we think of as modern attributes of the romcom originated here, which makes the storytelling recognizable. But there’s another aspect of It Happened One Night and other older films that still feel fresh: The economics of their stories and characters.
Do You Know How Long it Takes a Working Man to Save $5,000?
America has always been a country defined by income inequality. To quote the modern classic Dazed and Confused, this country was founded because “a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes,” and the subsequent history of this nation is basically an endless struggle between the slobs vs. snobs6, except the slobs always seem to think they could be snobs if they could just win the lottery or something7.
It Happened One Night was written and filmed at the height of the Great Depression, and the grim economic reality of the country is infused into every frame. Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is a naive, pampered heiress who flees her father’s yacht when he imprisons her there so he can obtain an annulment for her hasty marriage to gold-digging pilot King Westley8. She embarks on a desperate trek to New York City to be with King as her father sics detectives on her and stirs up a nationwide womanhunt by offering a large reward for her location9.
Riding the Greyhound “night bus10,” she meets journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who decides to help her evade her father in exchange for an exclusive on her story. Warne has recently been fired/quit his newspaper job, so a big story would put him back in the good graces of his editor. Ellie and Peter initially despise each other, but as they make the journey to New York, enduring many trials and tribulations and modes of travel, they naturally fall in love11.
If that plot sounds familiar, remind yourself that this film did it—well, if not precisely first (many of these tropes existed before 1934), it was still 90 years before Anyone But You.
Money—and a severe lack of it—is a constant worry in the story. Peter’s unemployed at exactly the worst time in U.S. history, and Ellie loses all her money to a thief early on. Their lack of funds pushes them into increasingly desperate modes of travel and requires a little light deception and grifting in order to survive12. People around them are even more desperate; a woman on the bus faints from hunger, and her crying son informs Peter that they haven’t eaten in days because they ran out of money. The setting for the first half of the film is primarily that Greyhound night bus, several bus stations, and rest stops13. At the time, this was where you’d find yourself if you needed to travel cheap, and the population on the bus is working class at the high end.
Ellie is an heiress, of course, and much of the story is concerned with teaching her lessons about the real world outside the bubble of her money. But even she understands something about economic hardship, as she had to pawn her watch—the only thing of value she had when she fled her father’s boat—in order to stake herself. The film’s realistic portrayal of just how difficult life gets when you’re counting pennies still resonates 90 years later, and helps the film feel modern14. You get a similar buzz of modernity in another Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life, in which working-class struggles to own a home and save $5,000 (about $85,000 in today’s money) don’t sound at all dated despite being written almost eighty years ago.
I'll Remember That When We Need Forty Cars
Of course, it’s not just the money stuff that helps It Happened One Night feel like it could have been made in 2010 or so. Capra was a solid director, and his use of closeups, low angles, and off-center shots gives it a lively, modern feel especially when compared to the more static stuff you find in many older films. The script, officially written by Robert Riskin and Samuel Hopkins Adams (but reportedly with input from Capra) snaps along, with brisker pacing than most older films.
And there are certainly aspects of the film that do date it pretty badly. Not just the fashions, although if Gable’s pants rose any hire he’d be wearing a onesie15, but of course the rampant, jovial sexism and misogyny. Ellie is a real character and comes across as intelligent, resourceful, and fun, but she’s also infantilized by every man around her. Warne confiscates her money, telling her she’s bad with it, and she doesn’t complain. A married man makes advances toward her, and it’s kind of treated as perfectly natural for married men to at least try their luck with random women who look like Claudette Colbert, and the only way to deter him is for Peter to pretend he’s her husband, because otherwise she’d be fair game. Ellie has zero ambitions or education as far as you can tell—she doesn’t want to do anything, accepting that her role in life is to marry someone and probably have kids. There are several cheerful references to domestic violence that everyone just grins at, and Ellie is the only female character in the whole story. Every other woman is a nameless mother, old lady, secretary, or background character. In that sense 1934 was truly a different time, and the film reflects that.
But if you’ve ever in your life had to cash in a jar of spare change at a Coinstar machine so you could afford something vital, the general air of economic misery and uncertainty in It Happened One Night will feel very, very recent to you16.
Of course, the last time I tried to use a Coinstar machine, my jar turned out to be full of buttons17.
NEXT WEEK: Project Hail Mary and knowing when a trick is played out.
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Sadly, I can attest that this is also true for older writers.
Except have burritos delivered via drone, which I consider to be the hallmark of a truly developed civilization. When the aliens contact us and invite us to join the Galactic Council of Cool Species and we ask why now, they’ll say: “Burritos.”
The slang: Going out to a juice joint is the cat’s pajamas! Heck, I used that phrase yesterday.
This is probably Hollywood’s plan, the lazy bastards. Still, offer me some money to digitize my face and voice and I’m in, you son of a bitch.
The film is pre-code, so it’s actually surprisingly frank about sex, and offers up a bare-chested Clark Gable, which was pretty great in 1934.
I am 100% a slob, but I always think I am a snob, which tells you everything you need to know about me.
If the lottery could be won without actually buying a ticket, that would be way cooler.
Who hasn’t been imprisoned by their parents? I mean … seriously, is it just me? I was rowdy.
$10,000 in 1934 dollars, which is almost $250,000 today. Jebus, I’d turn in my own mother for that kind of money.
One of the rare disorienting aspects of the past is that Greyhound buses were once the cheapest way to get around. Today it’s usually (though not always) cheaper to fly places than take a Greyhound.
I’ve done a few road trips with people in my day, and have learned a hard lesson: No one falls in love on a road trip. The opposite, very much so.
I manage to survive by dancing for nickels. Check out www.jeffdancesfornickels.org.
I drove cross-country when I was 22 years old. I slept in my 1978 Chevy Nova and washed up at rest stops along the interstate, inspiring several local legends that are still used to frighten children to this day.
It also makes capitalism feel like a failed experiment, but that’s another essay.
There is a photo of me at age 23 in the office at my first job where my pants are so comically large on me I look like a 12-year-old playing dress up. How anyone took me seriously remains a mystery.
Also, if you wear your pants very high.
Also: Drunkenly scrawled, apologetic IOUs from Past Jeff, who was a real asshole.