Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 1934 begins with pampered heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) interned aboard her daddy’s yacht. He’s annulled her quickie marriage to aviator “King” Westley before it could be consummated and is trying to get her to change her mind. To escape him, she jumps off the boat and goes on the run from the detectives her daddy hires to bring her back.

To reunite herself with the oily Westley, Ellie ends up on a bus bound from Miami to New York. On board, she matches wits with recently fired reporter Peter Warne, played by Clark Gable with all the breezy masculinity he’d become known for. Warne has a smart answer for everything and has Ellie agree to give him her exclusive story, or he’ll tell her father where she is. Hilarity, romance and hijinks at the altar ensue.

Directed by Frank Capra, from a screenplay Robert Riskin adapted from a short story in Cosmopolitan by Samuel Hopkins Adams, It Happened One Night was one of the first appearances of the romantic comedy in film. Its plot has been widely mimicked, whether by Roman Holiday or Runaway Bride, and has endured despite being almost 75 years old.

Capra worked for Columbia Pictures, which at the time was a low rent studio. They had few stars under contract and had to “borrow” talent, as all the stars of the day were locked into exclusive deals elsewhere. But Paramount and MGM were both looking to punish two of their more insubordinate players – Colbert and Gable – and decided to loan them out to Capra so they could experience the indignity of working for a cheap outfit.

Neither star was happy with the arrangement, but while Gable soon cooperated with Capra, Colbert did not want to be in the movie and continued to give the director a difficult time throughout filming. Even after it turned out to be a sleeper hit and she was nominated for an Academy Award, Colbert disliked the movie so much that she stayed away from the awards ceremony.

It Happened One Night became the first film to win Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, a feat that would be duplicated only by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. Upon winning Best Actress, Colbert, who is feisty and amusing as daddy’s little girl throughout the film, finally came around and thanked Capra.

The script is a harmless romance more than it is any kind of laugh-out loud comedy. The actual chuckles don’t even come until after the first hour, when Colbert & Gable pretend to be a bickering couple to throw off the hired detectives, and again when Colbert comes up with a novel way to get a car to stop and give them a lift. But the movie is consistently sweet natured throughout.

What I enjoyed about It Happened One Night was how freely Capra moves the camera. Most of the films of the period were shot almost as theatre productions with a very static camera and action running past the lens. Capra took the shooting outdoors, attaching the camera to a movable crane; the result is a much lighter and graceful touch than any movie of the period could fashion. The scene where Gable carries Colbert on his back across an actual creek in the dead of night is particularly memorable.

This visual setup achieves a great sense of verisimilitude when it comes to showing what travel was like in the 1930s. From the uniforms of the bus drivers, to the “auto camps” (forerunners of motels), to the diners along the bus route, or the hobos riding atop trains or in boxcars as they rattled past, if nothing else, the movie stands as a wonderful social document of the time in which it was made.