It Happened One Night

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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.