It Happened One Night - "Jericho At Night"

It Happened One Night (1934)

K: Spoiler alert (this movie has been out for 74 years so if you don't know that they're going to hook up at the end, it's your loss). So they hook up at the end. But you actually don't see those characters hook up. You hear about it. And the whole ending lasts two minutes. Romantic comedies aren't made like that anymore. The last half hour is typically seeing the two leads together, like a montage of them as a couple. What's your take on that? Do you think it's because of how audiences are today?

H: Well, Mama Cass et al say that "Unrequited love's a bore", but actually the opposite is true. Requited love is usually boring. The most interesting stories for me are where love goes sour or people who should be together by all accounts don't end up together or are together fleetingly (think Mulder and Scully). The end of this movie is like a person running to catch a train that's left the station and you can't see how they'll board and only at the very end does someone help them into the caboose (that's not a euphemism). This is an apt metaphor because so much of the movie involves them traveling together. It's the thrill of the chase, not the holding hands on the way back, that's really interesting. Bliss is boring.

K: I want to make a quick reference to an article from the New Yorker (*Sound of Andrew vomiting*) written by film critic David Denby comparing romantic movies from the 30s and 40s to romantic movies of today. A lot of his points address my first question. He compares this movie to Knocked Up (2007). A lot of the article focuses on leads in the old movies (like "It Happened One Night") being equals whereas in "Knocked Up", we as an audience can't understand why the girl falls for that guy. They're not equals. Adam's Rib (1949) and Roman Holiday (1953), to name a few present the equality of the sexes and the equal matching. "Adam's Rib" does it straight-up - they're both in the same profession and they're both strongly opinionated. "Roman Holiday" appears as though it's Audrey Hepburn's character makes the biggest change, but her passion for life is equally matched with Gregory Peck's.

H: Clark Gable's and Claudette Cobert's characters are even matches for each other - they're both funny in equal amounts, both witty, and keep each other guessing - which is why we want them to be together and why we ultimately believe the ending without seeing for ourselves that the trumpet was blown (again not a euphemism) and the walls came down. "Knocked Up" had a different pattern. The two leads "hooked up", as the young people (and Tom Wolfe in I am Charlotte Simmons) say, almost at the start of the movie. Then their paths diverged until she found out she was pregnant. Then they got along and tried to start anew, then they became estranged and only then do we have the tension that "It Happened One Night" has for the entire movie - the two leads aren't "together". The leads in "Knocked Up" get together and then we see them together for a good stretch with no tension and no surprises. So is Denby's observation about the difference between modern romantic comedies (or romcoms) and old romantic comedies in fact a criticism of modern romantic comedies? If so, do you agree?

K: Didn't you read the article? Yes. And I do agree with him. He puts into words what I can't explain but agree with about classic films. Not to say that there aren't classics that get the romance thing wrong, but the majority of believable romances come from old movies.

H: So Western Civilization is in decline, eh Chicken Little? I'm trying to come up with a counterexample. Judd Apetow's other movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) comes to mind, but then again the guy and girl don't get equal screen time - it's really a story about the virgin himself (Steve Carell's character) and only secondarily about his girlfriend. Readers, please jump in here if you can think of a modern movie that does this well.

The Lion In Winter is another example (also an old movie) of the whole even matched, sparring thing. Our prejudice against today's movies rears it's ugly head here, doesn't it?

K: True dat.

H: This movie establishes several comedic tropes. The hitchhiking scene has the whole "anything you can do I can do better". The traveling mishaps foretell Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987). And I hate to keep invoking Shakespeare, but when he leaves the hotel to get money to buy her a ring and she takes it as him leaving her for good, that's straight "Comedy of Errors".

K: That's straight "Three's Company" in my opinion.

H: So this is the comedy to end all comedies, at least until Annie Hall (1977), which isn't predicated on sexual innocence and funny misunderstandings. The thing is, we don't see "it" (meaning sex) happen that night. It's a pretty suggestive title for the time, but the separate twin beds and the "walls of Jericho" keep us safely within 1930s decorum. Only the sound of the trumpet gives us inklings of what happens that night.

K: "It Happened That Night" didn't seem suggestive to me because I thought falling in love "happened" that night. But I'm the same person that thinks "Dancing in the Dark" is about doing the robot with the lights off.