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Critics Consensus: Capturing its stars and director at their finest, It Happened One Night remains unsurpassed by the countless romantic comedies it has inspired.
Critic Consensus: Capturing its stars and director at their finest, It Happened One Night remains unsurpassed by the countless romantic comedies it has inspired.
All Critics (54) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (53) | Rotten (1) | DVD (4)
It's all about the snappy dialogue and simmering tension between these hugely charismatic stars.
A charming, human, believable story, with charming, human, believable characters.
It's probably more historically important than it is a masterpiece (the last 20 minutes take the missed conections and misunderstandings an inch too far), but it's still very easy to fall in love with.
The direction is excellent. Frank Capra never lets his picture lag for a moment. It is never very exciting, but it moves along snappily and it is full of amusing situations.
Instead of attempting a journalistic study of bus-travel, regularly punctuated by comic touches, Director Frank Capra and Robert Riskin who adapted Samuel Hopkins Adams' story, fused the two.
One of those stories that without a particularly strong plot manages to come through in a big way, due to the acting, dialog, situations and direction.
It Happened One Night is as lively, witty and romantic as ever. Buoyed up by dual performances from two of the era's greats, Capra's film maintains its status as a classic.
It's sweet, cheerful, funny, and very, very good.
One of the best comedies of its era, with a rich inventiveness of character and situation.
Frank Capra's It Happened One Night was a film that defied expectations to such an outrageous extent that the cinema has never fully recovered from its impact or influence.
Perhaps not the greatest of the screwball comedies, but Frank Capra's It Happened One Night is one of the racier.
Viewed even today with all of its plot elements recycled ad nauseam by Hollywood (for rom-coms, road trip comedies, odd couple/buddy films, etc.), the film still holds up because we believe Gable and Colbert and can identify with them both right away.
This charming classic may be the very first screwball comedy of Cinema, a funny, amusing and optimistic movie with a deliciously sharp dialogue and wonderful performances from Gable and Colbert, who have a great onscreen chemistry together.
Super Reviewer
Frank Capra's road trip from Miami to New York is actually a poem to everyday America and Americans (your unwashed masses) and laced throughout with vignettes of common people simply enjoying life ... practically the blueprint for Hollywood gold. Remember James Cameron's Titanic? Well, here is where he stole the central theme. Gable and Colbert are great as the surrogates for us in this tale, he as the jack-of-all-trades everyman, and she as the princess who finds her Prince Charming is closer than she thinks. It never gets old, the scene in the bedroom still laced with agonizingly palpable tension, even after all these years.
Colbert and Gable hated making it and it ended up being one of Hitler's favorite films, but Capra's perfectly scripted romantic comedy has a stamp of glorious old-Hollywood quality.
With the company of a charming newspaperman, a woman flees her father to marry a man whom her father disapproves of. I've finally found a Frank Capra film that I don't find so saccharine that I found myself rolling my eyes all the way up into my cranium. This is not to say that this film has any great substance. It's a high-energy, madcap farce that has just enough pathos to keep it from becoming Bringing Up Baby and just enough fun to keep Capra from making great pronouncements of life and morality. I thought that the characters' changes, particularly on the father's part, were too convenient, and Peter's near-abuse of Ellie makes it odd that she would have any great affection for him. Overall, though the film often defies credulity, it is one of my favorite Capra films, and I'm glad that I can finally like one of his movies.
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