silver nitrate notes

It Happened One Night and the Walls of Jericho

30 aug 2013

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) was the first film to sweep the top five Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay). Nobody involved expected this. The film had been in development at Columbia for a year, had been refused by three directors and four leading actresses before Capra got to it, and had been shot in twenty-six days on a budget under $350,000. When it opened in February 1934, the studio expected it to lose money. It made fourteen times what it cost.

The reason the film works is the relationship between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, photographed by Joseph Walker (1892-1985) in a conversational mode that Capra and Walker would spend the next decade refining into a recognisable style. Walker's contribution is often underwritten because his work was, by design, unobtrusive. He shot in available light when he could, used fill as minimally as possible, and framed two-shots in such a way that a change of expression in either actor read at the edges of the frame as well as the centre.

The motel scene with the blanket, which Gable calls the walls of Jericho, is the famous one. The Production Code had been tightened in 1934 to prohibit unmarried couples sharing a bedroom on screen. Capra's workaround is the blanket strung across the room on a clothesline, which divides the space into two camps. Gable and Colbert talk to each other through the blanket. We see her in her half, undressing for bed behind an opaque object; we see him in his, not watching, which is as much for the audience's benefit as the Code's. Walker shoots the scene with the camera on Gable's side for most of the exchange, which means the blanket is at the back of the frame and Colbert's silhouette moves across it as she prepares for bed. The scene is decent, risqué, and funny, all at once.

The hitchhiking sequence is the other scene that survives. Gable demonstrates three techniques for flagging down cars, all of which fail; Colbert lifts her skirt, shows a calf, and has a car stopped within two seconds. The gag is an old vaudeville routine updated. Walker photographs it in a long take with the camera at road level. Colbert's timing of the leg-reveal is the whole point. Capra gives her the frame.

The film's success changed what Columbia was allowed to make. Capra would go on to do Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). All of them are better films. This is the one that let him make them.

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sources
[1] Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. Macmillan, 1971.
[2] McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. Simon & Schuster, 1992.
[3] Poague, Leland. Another Frank Capra. Cambridge UP, 1994.
[4] Walker, Joseph. Interview in American Cinematographer, March 1979.