It Happened One Night (1934)
Directed by Frank Capra
A runaway heiress makes a deal with the rogue reporter trailing her but the mismatched pair end up stuck with each other when their bus leaves them behind.
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What critics compared It Happened One Night to
But given that the movie so blatantly hews to the original It Happened One Night formula-- complete with drippy husband-to-be (Adam Scott, so much more fun when he's smarmy) waiting at the end-- it has to be said: these two are no Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.
This one takes the idea of the glossy "French Kiss," the classics "I Know Where I'm Going" and "It Happened One Night" and about two dozen other squabbling-couple-dealing-with-a-disaster-prone-journey movies and, as Woody Allen once said of his mother's cooking, "puts it through the de-flavorizing machine."
In this heavily diluted version of those classics It Happened One Night and I Know Where I'm Going, on the way to wed Dream Man, Anna gets sidetracked by Sarcastic Guy.
Though a loose update of 1945's "I Know Where I'm Going," the soulless script patches together influences ranging from 1934's "It Happened One Night" to 1997's "The Matchmaker," which was also about an ambitious American who falls for a surly Irishman.
Instead of a tonal and story amalgam of Local Hero and It Happened One Night, we get a pile-up of tired moments that are the product of whomever did the Google search that revealed the leap day custom.
Not only are their references to real life romantic films – such as the poster for “It Happened One Night” that hangs over her bed – but there’s a running gag about a made-up film that’s is one of her favorites which runs to the very end of the movie.
Preston Sturges this is not, nor Frank Capra (a poster for "It Happened One Night" hangs over Jamie's bed), nor even Judd Apatow, whose "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" much more successfully merged sweetness and saltiness.
Why if it isn't George Clooney in a perfectly jaunty performance that seems to channel both the roguish comedic charm of Clark Gable in "It Happened One Night" and the earnest zaniness of Cary Grant in his screwiest comedies.
But the film, essentially a road movie, isn't as much fun along the way as such old gems as Sturges' The Palm Beach Story or Frank Capra's It Happened One Night.
Debuting Writer-director Gareth Edwards mounts this cross of “It Happened One Night” and “The War of the Worlds” with lovely cinematography, dry humor (our contemporary immigration debate is given a stark new dimension here) and a real sense of people and place.
It covers the spectrum, too, sampling bits of “It Happened One Night,” “Apocalypse Now,” “District 9” and “Before Sunrise,” all set to a sci-fi beat that you can dance to – if you have the patience.
Despite its gigantic, squid-like aliens from outer space that have crash-landed in northern Mexico, Monsters (from Magnet Releasing) conjured memories for me of Frank Capra's 1934 comedy classic, It Happened One Night.
A cross between 2004's " The Motorcycle Diaries ," 2005's " The War of the Worlds ," and 2009's " District 9 " with plenty of 1934's "It Happened One Night" thrown in, "Monsters" is, collectively, like no other feature film in memory.
And it also means that the road movie takes on an It Happened One Night quality as these bickering strangers are thrown together against the odds.
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But after the initial scene of suicide, it turns into an old-fashioned, on-the-road romantic comedy, reminiscent of It Happened One Night and The Sure Thing .
Taking some from Ernst Lubitsch -- at that transplanted Berliners funeral, Wyler lamented that Worse than no more Lubitsch; no more Lubitsch films -- and much from It Happened One Night, this fairy tale of the unhappy princess and her knight-errant on a Vespa was written by John Dighton and Ian McLellan Hunter, who won an Oscar.
A viewer with a long memory might recall some plot similarities between "Roman Holiday" and "It Happened One Night."
At least one scene did capture and hold my attention: when Knaus's car breaks down with Lauda driving and leaves the pair stranded on the quiet road in the Italian countryside, they each attempt to hitch a ride, and the outcome provides a clever twist on a similar scene performed by Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in 1934's "It Happened One Night."
Lauda, who calculates the risk in everything, has a less impulsive courtship of Marlene ( Alexandra Maria Lara ), though it does start with one of the film's most pleasing scenes, a hitchhiking episode that offers a reverse twist on the celebrated Clark Gable/Claudette Colbert moment in "It Happened One Night."
They run off together, and their It Happened One Night hitchhiking scene in the Italian countryside takes an amusing turn.
Thus this wise and charming live-action cartoon evokes the bittersweet moments of childhood where the two youngsters fling themselves into an adventure of their own making filled with fights, captures, escapes and even a ersatz wedding right up there with “It Happened One Night” for on-the-road romance.
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Viewers old enough to remember “Romancing the Stone” and the Indiana Jones movies — heck, anyone with passing familiarity with screwball rom-coms a la “It Happened One Night” — will recognize the broad contours of “The Lost City,” which spoofs and pays homage to its predecessors with equally playful enthusiasm.
Such deficiencies might have been compensated for by sparkling dialogue, but that doesn’t happen; the unfunny rants handed to Radcliffe’s smirking Fairfax are a signal case in point, but the banter between Loretta and Alan never approaches an “It Happened One Night” level.
Let me hasten to note that director James Mangold 's latest has none of that magical lightness of touch that shaped classic screwball comedy so deftly and elegantly you'd follow attractive lovers on the run (say, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in " It Happened One Night ") to the ends of the earth, a smile on your face every inch of the way.