It Happened That Night

It Happened That Night

1) Relate the Film to the class discussion
     This film was one of the first movies during the transition of films from silent to sound. It comes after the ban on over sexualized films. It is the first of many screwball comedies. To replace the sexualized images and scenes in prior films, screwball situations between couples came into play. You see they have a lot of sexual tension but none of it is every shown and is done in a funny way instead of being entirely sexual. It makes us read between the lines.
2) Article
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/12648/It-Happened-One-Night/articles.html

This article discusses how this was one of the first screwball comedies that inspired so many others and how the making of the movie was a screwball comedy itself. The film stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert were described as bratty stars during the production of this film. Gable arrived to his first meeting with the director drunk, angry, and demanding a raise. After reading the script then he actually fell in love with his character. Colbert was only really in it to make her $50,000 she was offered for 4 weeks. She didn't want to work with director Frank Capra again claiming their previous work together was a disaster. She even told her friends after filming that she just finished the most horrible film in the world. The film ended up winning all the awards at the Academy Awards.

3) Relate the article to the film
   As the article talks about how much of a success the film became even though it was tough to get the cast to get through it. As discussed in class that this film was right after the big sexual ban, the biggest parts of the movie was anytime skin was shown as Gable's chest, and Colbert's legs. Colbert originally did not want her leg to even be shown and they hired a double for the hitchhiking scene but she was unhappy with the double and did it anyway

4) Critical Analysis of the Film
  I personally enjoyed the film with it's characters and storyline. The story itself is a story I see played out in so many modern movies. "The girl is set to be married to someone of high power, she befriends someone who can't compare and ends up falling for them instead." One of the most clever things I loved about this movie is the symbolism of the "wall of jericho". Whenever they stayed at motels they put that wall up to prevent anything intimate from happening because they were just friends or aquantinces . At the end of the movie we see the wall drop to the floor as their feelings for each other were confessed. The wall represented what in the modern day we would call the "friend zone". I thought it was cleverly done that since they don't show them kiss or anything they show us the wall on the floor and we all just understand and know exactly what happened.

CHECKLIST FOR PLAGIARISM

1) (  ) I have not handed in this assignment for any other class.

2) (  ) If I reused any information from other papers I have written for other classes, I clearly explain that in the paper. 

3) (  ) If I used any passages word for word, I put quotations around those words, or used indentation and citation within the text.

4) (  ) I have not padded the bibliography. I have used all sources cited in the bibliography in the text of the paper.

5) (  ) I have cited in the bibliography only the pages I personally read.

6) (  ) I have used direct quotations only in cases where it could not be stated in another way. I cited the source within the paper and in the bibliography.

7) (  ) I did not so over-use direct quotations that the paper lacks interpretation or originality.

8) (  ) I checked yes on steps 1-7 and therefore have been fully transparent about the research and ideas used in my paper.