It Happened One Night (1934 Frank Capra)

It's Oscars night in a scene in Changeling, and It Happened One Night wins Best Picture. It actually was Oscar night here too, so we watched it. (Cleopatra was also nominated and also starred Claudette Colbert, who hated this movie.)

Clark Gable (on loan to Columbia from MGM) and Colbert are fantastic in Robert Riskin's screenplay, based on a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, 'Night Bus'. Capra and Riskin wrote their first hit Lady For a Day at the La Quinta resort in California and so thereafter wrote them all there together.

There's a middle section where Joe Walker's photography becomes super diffused, super shimmery, then it hardens up again. I was wondering if it's designed by be a fairy tale element as they fall for one another.

There's also one of those outstanding montages - a lost art, usually not created by the film's editor but normally the job of a montage maker - this one isn't credited.

Missed Ward Bond as Bus Driver #1. With Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Jameson Thomas (the colourless King Westley), Alan Hale.

A lively gem.

I since learned that Capra eschewed close ups, always filmed the rehearsal, and often used it, often filmed a scene with 2-3 cameras, and was always alongside the editor cutting.