STORY OF THE SHOT
It Happened One Night
HOW THE WALLS OF JERICHO WERE CONSTRUCTED
WORDS IAN FREER
Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable push the boundary.
Icon Film Distribution, Imago
THE ORIGIN
The first film to win the Big Five Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay), Frank Capra’s 1934 belter It Happened One Night follows unemployed journo Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and runaway heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) on a bus-and-hitchhiking trip from Miami to Noo Yawk. Holing up on the road overnight, the key moment, a publicity photo for which is seen above, sees Warne hang a blanket over a clothesline (“Behold the walls of Jericho!”) to maintain propriety —what follows is funny, endearing, and cheekier than the cheekiest Nando’s. The idea is in the source material, Samuel Hopkins Adams’ short story Night Bus, but in the hands of Capra, screenwriter Robert Riskin and the sparkling actors, it is romcom gold.