Clark Gable attempts to teach Claudette Colbert the subtleties of hitchhiking in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), the unbeatable template for romantic comedy ever since, an evergreen road trip through 30s America which tells us plenty about the rich and the working class, men and women too, with Gable in his prime and Colbert in his pyjamas. As the critic Pauline Kael observed:
'It made audiences happy in a way that only a few films in each era do. In the mid-30s, the Colbert and Gable of this film became American's idealised view of themselves - breezy, likeable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained. It was the Annie Hall of its day - before the invention of anxiety.'
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