Skip to main content

Review: It Happened One Night (1934)



Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) comes as a perfect antidote to the seemingly endless crises and depression of present age. It celebrates love and happiness at their incorruptible states; affirms the existence and possible prevalence of “pure-at-hearts” goodness, and restores hope to a world that has shown signs of incurable damages. Even when seeing the film now under a slightly different social context, its counter-Depression positivism can seem at times too implausible a pipe dream. Ellie’s (Claudette Colbert) utilitarian kindness towards the hunger-stricken mother and son is largely induced by and acted on the strength of Peter’s (Clark Gable) disposition to boastful jests- he flaunts the money and pretends to be a millionaire; she responds on cue and squeezes that money into the hand of the son. Ironies like this indicate a discrepancy between the privileged and the destitute that is only going to widen: charitable instincts come more easily for those who are impervious to the travails of life, whose narratives follow the immutable line of having instead of striving. Peter, of the inferior class that also mires in impoverishment like the mother and son, hesitates before reluctantly giving away what is perhaps a few months’ rental. Never is a moment of individual kindness suffused with such pathos.

Great art entails multiplicity. Just as Capra rhapsodises the fairy-tale-like romance that transcends the boundary of classes, he makes no bones about the bleak aspect of reality that lurks around the beautiful picture. The first spark of affection between the unlikely pair is enkindled when both are compelled to put on an impromptu show of impersonation, as bickering husband and wife, to put off scent the detectives hired by Ellie’s father. Playacting soon becomes a convenient pretext of checking into motels and hitching for ride, a facile means for indulging in the intimacy that won’t even occur if outside this particular circumstance. It is only a matter of time that the tenuous line between reason and illusion is obliterated. This line, in the film, comes in the form of a “Wall of Jericho,” an old blanket that hangs between their beds, which cannot be toppled down if without the blast of trumpet (the implication is quite clear that I suppose no further explanation is needed). On the last leg of their journey, Ellie, moved by Peter’s ideal of living on a remote island, takes the initiative of crossing over the “wall” and pledging her love.

There is something unnerving about the notion of love equaling make-believe. By having courtship played out in the way of a double act Capra highlights the absurdity of human relationships. Ellie is plucked back to reality when a series of turn of events lead her to suppose that Peter’s heart is only on her money and not herself. The story ends in a wonderful way: Ellie’s hitherto domineering father, realising that the love between the pair is genuine and mutual, gives his daughter the invaluable gift of the autonomy, to decide for herself whom she will spend her life with. Self-determination assumes the ultimate power of dissolving all demarcations.

Another film that shares a similar storyline, Wyler’s Roman Holiday, ends with Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann chooses her royal duty over love, and the lovers separate. This coda is comparatively crueler but it underlines the noble characters of the protagonists, whose budding romance doesn’t lead them to willful ignorance of their responsibilities. The short-lived amour seems all but a dream; a very beautiful dream indeed.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

  In  Eichmann in Jerusalem  (1963), Hannah Arendt attributes the criminal mind of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann to a “sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity…”  A Report on the Banality of Evil , which is the book’s subtitle, introduces a kind of evil - the worst conceivable kind in human history - that departs from the “radical evil” that is at the heart of Arendt’s  The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951). Shortly after the publication of  Eichmann , Arendt wrote to philosopher Gershom Scholem:         […] I changed my opinion and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” […] It is        indeed my opinion now that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only        extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension […]        It is “thought-defying”, as I sai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: 3 Women (1977)

  In search of what he called an “astral America” in the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard came upon its ultimate symbol - the desert: “ Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” This initial ecstasy soon gave way to sobering contemplation - of technology, the ravages of modernity, the vacuity of the American dream, the mindless luxury of civilisation…”All societies end up wearing masks,” Baudrillard pronounces, tying his observation in with the premise of his seminal work,  Simulacra and Simulation , published just a few years back, that “artifice is at the very heart of reality.”   Baudrillard’s Delphic prose, which comprises the book  America , is echoed in the strange, banal imagery of  3 Women  (1977). The locales were Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs - arid plains where spirit decayed and hopes foundered. As is frequently the case, the drab physical landscape triggers an inverse response from the psycho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Playtime (1967)

  Having left his sister’s family at the end of  Mon Oncle  (1958), a bittersweet coda which I take to symbolise in some way the irretrievable loss of an age of innocence, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s beloved and bumbling alter ego, finds himself amongst other ill-adapted, increasingly mechanised denizens in a near-futuristic Paris -  Playtime  (1967), Tati’s penultimate full-length feature and arguably his best, involved a constructed set so lavish and enormous that the director was near bankrupt when he finished the film, three years after its start date. The so-called “Tativille” blends the Kafkesque with an impersonal internationalism; the scope of vision is at once grand and restrictive - there is space within a wide interior space and, as evidenced by a now canonical image of Hulot overlooking a grid of office cubicles (this anticipated by at least 20 years the dominance of such design), each inhabitant of the space seems contented and in a way codepende...
Post a Comment
Read more