Film Spotlight: It Happened on this Day!

“Take me to your island.  I want to do all those things you talked about. . . .  I love you.  Nothing else matters.”

The forerunner, the grandparent of screwball comedies It Happened One Night opened at New York's Radio City Music Hall on this day February 22, 1934!

The charming pre-code film, directed by Frank Capra, with a screenplay by Robert Riskin, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, soared on to become 1934's most notable success.

Based on a story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a headstrong heiress (Ellie) finds herself on a road trip of discovery with an unemployed cynical newspaper reporter (Peter). A runaway bride, he offers to help her reunite with her soon-to-be husband in exchange for an exclusive story, leading to an unexpected romance.  Due to the 1930 Hays Code being in force while the film was shot, its implied sexual content was primarily expressed with witty banter and innuendo.

The film focuses on traditional gender roles and the Great Depression. The ignorance that Ellie has of lower-class struggles highlights the difficulties they face. Coming from different economic worlds, their characters have very different experiences and understandings of the world. Their love for each other transforms them, providing a renewed spirit and the possibility that social divisions can be bridged.

 

On loan from MGM, Gable didn't bother to read the script. He arrived on the first day of shooting drunk and just wanted "it over with". Capra reprimanded him and he was cooperative and sober for the rest of the shoot. After not getting along with Capra in an earlier film For the Love of Mike (1927), Colbert accepted the part for double the salary, and a quick filming schedule so she could leave on vacation. Despite their shared could not care attitude, dissatisfaction with the script, and Colbert giving Capra a hard time, the film is perfection. Since both spend the majority of their screen time together, they needed to exude chemistry from the get-go. And they sure did! They give the film a relaxed quality that's light, funny, and refreshing to watch. The studio didn't have faith in the film so they barely promoted it. But after word of mouth and expanding through the States, Columbia earned over $2.5 million back on its $325,000 budget and another two million in theatrical rentals. It was the first film to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.

 

 

 

 

 

 On the Set with Gable, Colbert & Director Frank Capra

 

Did you know this was Bugs Bunny's creator Friz Freleng's favorite film and he based Bugs on Gable's mannerisms of eating carrots and talking quickly at the same time?

There was going to be a stunt double used for Colbert since it was immodest to show her leg. When she saw the stunt double, she said, "That's not what my leg looks like!" and insisted on using her leg.

 

Actresses considered for the lead role were Myrna Loy who hated the script and said "Claudette had the legs for it”. Loretta Young was suggested but Capra said No. Miriam Hopkins, who supposedly called it “just a silly comedy.” Sorry, Bette Davis, Warner Bros. won't lend you out. Carole Lombard wasn't available. Constance Bennett and Margaret Sullavan also said No. Eventually, Columbia's Harry Cohn suggested Colbert. 1934 was a great year for Colbert, appearing in two of the year's highest-grossing films Cleopatra and It Happened One Night.

 

Legend has it, there was a large decrease in undershirt sales around the country when Gable in the undressing scene had trouble removing his. As a result, some underwear manufacturers tried to sue Columbia.

 

 

 

 

 

 Actors considered for the lead actor was Robert Montgomery, who turned it down saying "the script was the worst thing he had ever read". And  Fredric March who also refused the part.

 

 

 

 

The fine supporting cast includes the likes of Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns.

Colbert decided not to attend the ceremony since she felt she would not win. She thought it was the "worst picture in the world" and planned to take a cross-country train trip. After she was named the winner, studio chief Harry Cohn sent someone to get her off the train and to take her to the ceremony. Colbert arrived wearing a suit that she had Paramount Pictures costume designer, Travis Banton, make for her trip. Despite the animosity toward Capra, she thanked him in her acceptance speech.

Shirley Temple presents the Best Actress Oscar to actress Claudette Colbert for her role in, "It Happened One Night"

 

Gable gave his Oscar to a child who admired it. The child returned it to the Gable family after Clark's death. On December 15, 1996, Gable's Oscar was auctioned off to Steven Spielberg for $607,500, who donated the statuette to the Motion Picture Academy.

 

"We made the picture quickly--four weeks. We stumbled through it, we laughed our way through it. And this goes to show you how much luck and timing and being in the right place at the right time means in show business; how sometimes no preparation at all is better than all the preparation in the world, and sometimes you need great preparation, but you can never out-guess this thing called creativity. It happens in the strangest places and under the strangest of circumstances. I didn't care much for the picture, ] it turned out to be 'It Happened One Night'." ---Director Frank Capra

 

The picture was the first to win the five most esteemed Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was remade several times: Musicals, Eve Knew Her Apples (1945) and You Can't Run Away from It (1956). And Indian films Chandrodayam 91966), Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin (1991) and Hudugaata (2007).

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Marlene Dietrich

 

 

"Life is a long rehearsal for a film that is never made"- Marlene Dietrich 

Bette Davis & the Academy Awards

 

Bette Davis had recently resigned as President of the Academy. In 1941, the 33-year-old assumed Hollywood's top job, proposed doing away with dinner and dancing at the Oscars and revoking the right of extras to vote — ideas that were later implemented — and was met with such great resistance that she stepped down after less than two months.

Davis hadn’t made it in Hollywood on her looks. She was smart, talented and suffered no fools, earning her the reputation of being “difficult” — and numerous contract suspensions — at Warner's, and it wasn’t long before the Academy’s board discovered her no-nonsense side. “At the first meeting I presided at as president. I arrived with full knowledge of my rights of office. I had studied the by-laws. It became clear to me that this was a surprise. I was not supposed to preside intelligently.”

She had two big initiatives she immediately pushed to enact. First, she wanted to reformat the annual Academy Awards banquet. Since her election, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, thrusting America into World War II and prompting calls for the cancellation of the Oscars, which had theretofore centered around dinner and dancing. She argued that it would be more appropriate to scrap the dinner and dancing and present the awards in a large theater, charging at least $25 a seat and donating the proceeds to war relief efforts. “The members of the board were horrified,” she later said. “Such an evening would rob the Academy of all dignity.”

Her other idea was to revoke the right of Hollywood’s thousands of extras to vote for the Oscars. She argued that many of them lacked taste, culture and “didn’t even speak English” — and besides, there were indications that their votes could be swung behind whichever studio hired them around the time of balloting. Davis later said the board regarded this as “the wildest thing they’d ever heard” and Wanger, now the first vice president, spoke up and “wanted to know what I had against the Academy.”

 

Davis quickly realized she was getting nowhere. “It was obvious that I had been put in as president merely as a figurehead,” she later wrote. “I sent in my resignation a few days later.” The Academy tried to keep the news from leaking while Zanuck, her sponsor, tried to run damage control. “He informed me that if I resigned, I would never work in Hollywood again. I took a chance and resigned anyway.” 

 

Her resignation was “regretfully accepted” by the board at its Jan. 7 meeting. The real reasons for her exit were kept largely under wraps at the time. THR reported that it “was predicated upon her feeling that the presidency of the Academy is a ‘full-time job’ which she did not feel she could fulfill in addition to her picture contract with Warners. Additionally, Miss Davis is not in robust health, and the performance of the titular Academy office would require an endurance which her doctors felt she did not possess.”

 

Wanger re-assumed the presidency, and two months later the 14th Oscars took place, still as a dinner, but minus dancing and formal attire, and with attendees asked to support the war effort. Extras retained the right to vote, which almost certainly tipped the scale in the best picture race against Citizen Kane, to the Academy’s eternal embarrassment. Within just a few years, though, the Academy had implemented both of Davis’ big ideas: the 16th Oscars were held in a theater, as has been every installment since, and extras lost the right to vote ahead of the 19th Oscars.

 

Davis, meanwhile, far from faded away. She was nominated for three more best actress Oscars before the end of the war, and spent most of her spare time supporting the war effort — she sold millions of dollars in war bonds and started the Hollywood Canteen to entertain servicemen on leave. She and Zanuck didn’t speak again until nine years had passed — “Because he had strongly recommended me, I’d embarrassed him,” she acknowledged — but they reconciled after he cast her in the greatest film of her career, the best picture Oscar winner All About Eve.

 

Late in life she confessed that she regretted abandoning the presidency of the Academy rather than staying and fighting for her ideas. “I resigned the position in order to show them, but then nobody cared. It’s usually a mistake doing something just to show someone. If I couldn’t function, if my suggestions were disregarded, why should I bother? They wanted a mere figurehead, someone famous to publicize the Academy. I didn’t know that. I wanted to rule.”

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Sidney Poitier

Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real."  Remembering Sir Sidney Poitier, born on today's date in 1927.

 

Fun Film Trivia

Jeff Bridges made his film debut in The Company She Keeps (1951) with Jane Greer. He's the infant Greer is holding in the scene below. They would work again 31 years later in Against All Odds (1984), a loose imagining of Out of the Past (1941) in which Greer also starred. Neither knew they once appeared together until filming began on Against All Odds.

 

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Elizabeth Taylor

"My god, I had black hair — it was photographed blue-black it was so dark — and thick bushy eyebrows. And my mother and father had to stop them from dying my hair and plucking out my eyebrows. The studio even wanted to change my name to Virginia. They tried to get me to create a Joan Crawford mouth when I first began using lipstick at fifteen. They wanted, you know, Joan Crawford, the ‘40s and everything. Every movie star, Lana Turner, all of them, painted over their lips: and I’m sure that some of them had perfectly fine, full lips — but thin eyebrows were the fad…and God forbid you do anything individual or go against the fad. But I did. I figured this looks absurd. And I agreed with my dad: God must have had some reason for giving me bushy eyebrows and black hair. I guess I must have been pretty sure of my sense of identity. It was me. I accepted it all my life and I can’t explain it. Because I’ve always been very aware of the inner me that has nothing to do with the physical me"

🎥 Review: Shoot the Moon (1982)

There have been motion pictures made about the collapse of marriages. Scenes froth with denial, anger, depression, to bitter custody battles and destructive emotions of jealousy and abuse.  Some that comes to mind like Scenes from a Marriage (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), An Unmarried Woman (1979), and more recently A Marriage Story (2019). But none of them in my opinion quite captured the confusion, heartbreak, and turmoil like  Shoot the Moon (1982). The phrase "shoot the moon," comes from the card game hearts. It refers to taking a risk when playing your hand to achieve a higher score.  

 

Directed by Alan Parker (Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame) and written by Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Melvin, and Howard). The film depicts an intense look at marital disintegration from the perspective of both parents and their children. Parker and Goldman called upon their marriages to create the screenplay. The late Albert Finney and Diane Keaton are The Dunlaps. After 15 years and four daughters, their marriage falls apart. it also stars Karen Allen, fresh off of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Peter Weller and the late Dana Hill, who gives a heartbreaking performance as the oldest daughter.

 

Set against a wet and foggy San Francisco, the Dunlaps live in a ranch house (which was a 114-year-old Roy ranch house, moved and rebuilt).  As George (Finney) and Faith (Keaton) are both getting ready for an International Book Awards dinner, their oldest daughter Sherry (Hill) overhears a phone conversation between her dad and his lover. At the awards, the mood is tense. By morning, George and Faith have it out and he moves in with Sandy (Black). He sees off his daughters at school but Sherry (the oldest), doesn't want to have anything to do with her unfaithful father. Meanwhile, Faith starts an affair with Frank (Peter Weller), a contractor who has been hired to build a tennis court on their property. But as Faith seemingly is moving forward, George grows increasingly unstable and violent. I must warn those who haven't seen the film, that there are scenes of violence and abuse that can be hard to watch.

 

 

This is not the usual Keaton, known for playing neurotic and quirky characters. Drawing from her recent breakup with Warren Beatty, she gives an emotionally naked performance. As a result, she garnered a Golden Globe, a National Society of Film Critics, and, a New York Film Critics Circle nomination.

 

As for Finney, I couldn't believe this was the same actor that played the gruff but lovable Daddy Warbucks in Annie (also in 1982). He's anguished and fragile yet disturbingly brutal. He also received nominations from British Academy Film Awards and the Golden Globes.

Albert Finney's thoughts on his character, 

"It required personal acting; I had to dig into myself. When you have to expose yourself and use your own vulnerability, you can get a little near the edge. Scenes, where Diane Keaton and I have to go at each other, reminded me of times when my behavior has been monstrous."

 

On my first screening of the film a few years after its release, I remembered how it hitting so close to home because my parent's marriage also ended in 1982.  Upon re-visiting the film for this review, I forgot how quiet it is. The non-explosive scenes that lingered on with no dialogue hit me right in the gut. Shoot the Moon is up there on my list of most under-appreciated films. Film critic writes Andrew Gleiberman, “To this day, the film touches nerves about what the end of a marriage is really about that virtually no film has approached since.” 

 

 

 

Letter welcoming the production to Shoot to the Moon

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Jack Lemmon

  

"If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable"

- Jack Lemmon

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Tyrone Power

Some day I will show all the motherf**kers who say I was a success just because of my pretty face. Sometimes I wish I had a really bad car accident so my face would get smashed up and I’d look like Eddie Constantine. It’s so tiring being everybody’s darling boy at my age … I know I’ve been lucky, that things have gone almost too smoothly career-wise. What I resent about it is that it is all built on a pretty face. Hollywood was such a crazy place, made you feel terrific at times. You felt you could achieve anything because you were treated like a god. But it sure was a bum place too. When you saw the new faces queuing up, like bloody comets, who would strike the screen and leave an old worshiped star obsolete in no time. Nobody will ever understand what this did to people, how it destroyed them, made them hollow … J***s C***t, I don’t want to become an ageless matinée idol, having to keep up my looks, lift my chin like Marlene and never dare smile in case my face cracks. - Tyrone Power

Buster Keaton- A Wonderful Soul

“I can still say that Buster Keaton was the kindest, gentlest man I have ever known. Everybody who knew him loved him, and I suppose that somewhere along the line I just joined the rest of the group. I think that these qualities come through in his films, and I trust that these pictures will remind everyone of what a wonderful soul he was.”

—Keaton’s wife Eleanor Norris

 

🎥Review: Vivacious Lady (1938)

 "It only took a day to happen but I'm in love with you for always"

A sweet, funny, romantic screwball gem of a film, starring two of my favorites, a real-life couple at the time, Ginger Rogers and James Stewart. Directed by George Stevens who previously dated and directed Rogers in Swingtime (1936). Stewart plays a sweet and shy botany professor and Rogers is a spunky and charming nightclub singer who fall in love after a one-night courtship. But can they survive his conservative domineering parents, misunderstandings, secrets, jealous ex-fiance, and The Big Apple? Onscreen the two exude genuine chemistry. The cozy couple is constantly touching and cuddling. It's so infectious to watch as are Rogers' comedic skills and Stewart's emergence as a leading man. 

 

Also starred Beulah Bondi (one of five times that Bondi plays Stewart's mother), Charles Coburn, Franklin Pangborn, Frances Mercer, Grady Sutton, Jack Carson, and Hattie McDaniel. Stewart was on loan from MGM, making this one of his earliest leading roles. Rogers was dating Stewart at the time and recommended him for the role. But after four days of shooting in April 1937, Stewart became ill. RKO considered replacing him but postponed the production until December 1937. He went on to film Of Human Hearts (1938) with Bondi playing his mother. While the film was stalled, actors Donald Crisp and Fay Bainter (as well as others) who were originally cast during production, were replaced by Charles Coburn and Beulah Bondi.
 

 

 

My favorite part is the CAT-FIGHT! The prop department wrapped Ginger's legs with boards for the funny drag-out brawl carefully choreographed by Director Stevens between her and Mercer. The film opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The screenplay was written by P.J. Wolfson and Ernest Pagano and adapted from a short story by I. A. R. Wylie.

  

 

Rogers & Stewart went on to win Oscars for The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Kitty Foyle (1940).