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[…] both Riskin and Capra adapted Samuel Hopkins Adams’s short story “Night Bus” for the screen, with Capra having read the story in a barbershop in Palm Springs and then heading off to tell Riskin about it immediately. The source of the narrative was Cosmopolitan magazine, where they had previously picked up “Madame La Gimp”. This time, rather than just making subtle changes, Riskin changed characters and the narrative trajectory of the tale considerably, a tactic that would make all the difference in the product: It Happened One Night.
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The hero of “Night Bus,” Peter Warne, a chemist with a degree, is rather smart and a little soppy. In the final script for the film, Riskin turned him into a hard-bitten reporter who drinks, likes the company of women, and has an eye for a good story. Elspeth Andrews became Ellie Andrews, a touch more streetwise but a little less sexually provocative. As the story unfolds, both of the characters gain more and more sympathy. (Capra attributed this effect to sometime collaborator and personal friend Myles Connolly, but this claim needs some qualification.)
From two actors who were not even clear choices or overly committed to the project—Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert— Capra and Riskin drew near-career-best performances. It was a constant feature of their collaboration that they were able to coax out the talent in the actors and actresses working on their movies. Riskin’s particular gift was in making actors fit comfortably into their roles. Gable came into his own as an “ironic masculine presence” in It Happened One Night, and Claudette Colbert revealed previously undiscovered depths in her screen persona, just as, a little later, Capra and Riskin would turn Gary Cooper “into the offbeat embodiment of small town simplicity, honesty and common sense.” […]
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Gable made Peter Warne seem effortlessly easy to pull off, and Colbert’s notorious reluctance to take on the role—she virtually set the shooting schedule by demanding that she work no more than four weeks before her skiing vacation—is barely visible in her sassy, smart, and ultimately sexy rendition of Ellie Andrews. Considering that the word “sentimental” often arises when talking of Capra’s work, it is remarkable how unsentimental Riskin’s characters, and especially their romances, could be. As McGilligan asserts, Riskin always strayed from the obvious, the mawkish, and the just plain slushy in favor of subtler outlets for screen romance. In particular, actresses like Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck brought feisty independence and a particular brand of sex appeal to the Capra-Riskin plots that never materialized in tales offering the most obvious of romantic finales.
Robert Sklar’s interesting analysis of It Happened One Night attempts to distance the story from the picture’s legacy as the first real screwball narrative by relating story and character to their connections to 1920s culture and society, and especially to periodicals like Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post, from which such original material came. Sklar argues that some of the rough edges of the story are taken away from Ellie and Peter in the film, and he notes that Ellie succeeds in scrambling out of her social condition, unlike the women of Capra’s pre-1934 movies—particularly Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, and Forbidden, where only tragedy and despair await them.
The argument has some merit, but even Sklar accepts that the genteel, heroic position of the male protagonist is not quite as straightforward as it might be in It Happened One Night’s interpretation of Adams’s story. Riskin makes the road trip that Ellie and Peter undertake together from Miami to New York a concoction of truth or dare, lies and secrets withheld and then revealed, wider social and sexual liaisons slowly unwrapped and discovered on both sides. As they encounter adventures along the way, with Ellie seeking to escape her marriage, and Warne undertaking to escort her back to her father, romance blossoms [75] and the two fleeting spirits from across social divides find mutual desires. Sexual tension, the film’s most resonant message, is left smoldering once more in Riskin’s trademark way. Cinematic Warne is no longer the literary sap Warne, with only his looks and genteel manner to bestow upon Ellie, and she is no more the rich, provocative vamp Elspeth, with only sex and money to sell. One might be tempted to describe this as sophisticated screwball, but it says a lot about Riskin’s sensitivity to his characters that he can maintain the “will they, won’t they” trajectory of the narrative without ever losing his players’ values or ideals. They don’t have to lose their established foibles and predilections to finally gravitate toward each other. When Peter leaves Ellie in the middle of the night, with no note explaining his absence, we might suppose this is all a plot device. Ellie automatically assumes Peter has gone to file his sensational story of the socialite who now wants to go AWOL from her wealthy aviator husband, when in reality he has gone to find money so that they can be married in better economic circumstances. But Riskin makes Warne’s actions, his reluctance to reveal a moral side to his nature, and his confusion about such a strong romantic gesture seem quite understandable and perfectly in tune with his character, rather than just one final obstacle en route to the inevitable tryst.
One might go further in suggesting that It Happened One Night was not simply the realization of a lasting 1920s cultural trope in Riskin and Capra’s work, but that their films continued to hedge their bets between a wider, twentieth-century urban sophistication in their characters and the nineteenth-century agrarian simplicity often identified in protagonists in future pictures. Toward the end of the film, there is a comic confrontation that sums up this theme brilliantly for Riskin’s work. Ellie’s father (Walter Connolly) recognizes that his daughter has been affected by meeting Warne. She confesses that she loves Peter but thinks he must surely now despise her, because she ran back to King Westley (Jameson Thomas), the sop she is due to remarry in an elaborate ceremony. “He despises everything I stand for. He thinks I’m spoiled and pampered,” she says to her father of Peter. “He doesn’t think much of you either. He blames you for everything that’s wrong about me. Thinks you raised me stupidly.”
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“Fine man to fall in love with,” says her father with a wry smile. “Oh he’s marvelous,” retorts Ellie without hesitation. Ellie’s father, like so many patriarchal figures in Riskin’s scripts, spots aspects of warmth and humanism in Ellie’s comments and an aching desire to break the shackles of convention. Westley acts like royalty from the Victorian age, and Ellie’s father can see how modern and progressive his daughter has become under the influence of Warne. It was the contrast between duty and choice, enfranchisement and passivity, that proved crucial in displaying the enveloping control of state authority and social complicity over people of different statuses and backgrounds, a theme first brought to the fore in this, the biggest comedy hit of Riskin’s and Capra’s careers.
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