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

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke
1 comment
Read more

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are
Post a Comment
Read more