As the first film ever to win the Academy Awards quintuple crown of Outstanding Production, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Writing (Robert Riskin), Best Actor (Clark Gable) and Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), It Happened One Night is an American screen classic. Combining elements from Samuel Hopkins Adams's original Cosmopolitan story "Night Bus" with a dose of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", Riskin's resulting romantic comedy is full of smart dialogue playing with a fish-out-of-water theme.

Using the appealing leads of Gable and Colbert it is a romance of coincidence and accidental purpose. Allowing for his character's practicality and her character's breeding it's a comedy of miscues and class distinction. Built on Capra's direction and produced at Columbia Pictures for some $325,000 it's now widely celebrated as a brilliant movie.

To my eyes that recently saw the film for the very first time so long after its canonization It Happened One Night seems like a picture caught within changing circumstances. I spent part of its running time watching the clock to know when it would end so I can't unashamedly glow with the praise of how perfect a movie it is. Yet I'm also not ignorant of its importance in the movie memory of so many that have taken from it a real feeling of the cinema being practiced at its height.

I agree with my critical forebears that Riskin's script is wonderful. Working with a cast of only six main parts, it distributes words well between characters without relying on either profanity or ribald humor to make the dialogue pop. Naturally some of this middlebrow sensibility stems from the Production Code of Joe Breen's office as Hollywood's official censorial body. But it also speaks to Riskin's wit and the comic potential of good actors working out confusing emotions and their changing identities.

No, my grievance isn't with the movie's script since It Happened One Night is a leap forward in screen comedy. Instead my grievance comes from understanding how it represents a paradigmatic shift in generic type that was only perfected later on in the '30s and '40s. In 1934, at the vanguard of screwball comedy, Capra's film relies too heavily on glamour shots of Gable and Colbert and certain narrative leaps that we've long since begun to consider corny.

For instance, Colbert's character Ellie Andrews is a rich heiress with an overbearing father named Alexander (Walter Connolly) and an inappropriate husband named King (Jameson Thomas). Longing to control her life she flees her father's Miami yacht where he's pressuring her to annul her marriage.

Into her journey is thrust Gable's newsman, Peter Warne, who's out of a job but sitting on possibly the biggest story of his career. Helping Ellie whose father chases after her with professional detectives, Peter agrees to deliver her to New York for a reunion with King in exchange for exclusive rights to her story.

Along the way they evade suspicion by acting like husband and wife and use unconventional transportation like buses and hitchhiking. Of course they fall in love, though not without complicating factors and various sorts of bad timing. A series of third act confessions and support players separate them in New York but her father finally sees the big picture and breaks up her marriage to King. Befitting the fate of a happy couple they end up together and live, we assume, happily ever after.

It's a set of story elements that weren't particularly original in 1934 save for the convincing brio of the lead performers. Subsequent years have also seen these same elements used, re-used and re-used again with such frequency that It Happened One Night can't help but seem a bit contrived even though it came first as so many aficionados would have us believe.

These misgivings aside, it's a movie with clever dialogue and a few now famously celebrated sequences like the so-called wall of Jericho. As a trial of opposites who attract the film plays out its romance with a healthy reliance on serendipitous complication along with the assurances of easy money from Ellie's seemingly endless family wealth.

Released as it was at the end of the Great Depression, Capra's film surely dabbles in wish fulfillment alongside being a gentle romantic adventure. Characterizing the Andrews family as wealthy beyond reason, the lifestyle Alexander Andrews enjoys allows him to spend in ways that would be inappropriate even for kings of industry in today's inflated economy. It follows then, that in 1934 his character's comforts, and by extension Ellie and Peter's comfort as his children, would be filled with such convenience as would have been nearly unheard of in the long, terrible shadow 1929.

One note about the film's class characterization is that rich people suffer similarly to the poor in matters of the heart. Another less emotionally democratic lesson, however, is that wealth leads to shiftiness and discontent since Ellie goes on her cross-country race because she's uneasy with herself and the decisions she's made. At once a validation of the common hero and a repudiation of money's hold on the popular imagination, Peter teaches Ellie what it is to live lean by freeing her to embrace his more practical values as superior to her superior breeding.

This reversed wealth fantasy likely appealed to moviegoers of the early '30s. With its populist leaning and emphasis placed on the lives of everyday people It Happened One Night, like the entire oeuvre of Frank Capra, celebrated common folk living with virtuous habits and a good work ethic. Thus some of the film's more memorable and happy sequences are those set in the bus and when the unlikely central couple begin hitchhiking up the East Coast.

Interestingly, Gable was at the time of the film's production an MGM contractee loaned to Columbia Pictures as a form of punishment since he'd previously refused to accept several scripts offered to him. Presuming his experience on Capra's comedy would encourage him to kowtow to in-house demands, the gamble backfired. Instead of learning his place, Gable emerged from the loan-out an Oscar winner and one of the biggest stars of his time. His scene munching raw carrots was eve reported to be the inspiration for Bugs Bunny's mannerisms just as his shirtless scene in the film may have hurt the sales of men's undershirts.

As was the standard for Academy Awards nominations in 1934, there were 12 films nominated for Outstanding Production. Though all 12 very were likely appealing movies in their moment, I can only remember The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Cleopatra, The Gay Divorcee, The House of Rothschild, Imitation of Life and The Thin Man as standout pictures with any cache aside from the eventual winner. The other five nominees, Flirtation Walk, Here Comes the Navy, One Night of Love, Viva Villa and The White Parade have mostly been consigned to the dustbin of time as asterisks for It Happened One Night although to discount them totally would be unfair.

Instead one need only realize the feverish pace of filmed entertainment with wide variance in quality and quantity from year to year. As such there are always worthwhile pictures forgotten in each year's burst of naming award winners just as there is a gamut of product pitched to film-goers simply to keep regular customers coming back for more.

In classical Hollywood before television invaded our homes this quality of satisfying consumers with filler product was as necessary as selling concessions candy and soda pop. Intended neither to earn fantastic profits nor generate much critical buzz these B-level pictures were even more variable in quality then A-level productions although they were far more numerous. They were centrally produced to amuse audiences with easily digested entertainment and to try out new performers and technicians as a kind of crucible on the way to greater success.

All of this is to say there were lots of films produced every year with 1934 as no exception. It's no surprise then that so much of the once celebrated work is now cast in the same lot as more anonymous products that hardly receive mention in histories of the medium. Times change, audience tastes adjust and much of what was once memorable becomes hazy just as some of the more forgettable instances of cultural accretion become dizzyingly revealing when interpreted with new contexts and greater retrospection.

Even so there is a balance to be named in It Happened One Night between the forgettable and the unforgettable, the everyday versus the classic and the B-level material alongside the A-level. On the one hand there is a terrific script and rich performances offered by two of Hollywood's leading actors of the time. On the other hand there is a deep reliance on chance encounters and performance styles that seem, at best, quaintly dated or, at worst, harshly unnatural in light of innovations like method acting that happened later on.

For my price of admission I see why Capra's movie was entered into the National Film Registry in 1993. It is one of American cinema's early sound-era keynote comedies and an entertaining showcase of classic studio talents. But it's also quite literal in what it's about so in the absence of any leading metaphors or rich analogies that can be drawn from the work I'm simply left with my gut reaction.

I liked it fine. So will you. But I wasn't blown away and I don't expect you to be either.