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"Stanzas Written on the Road Between Miami and New York." The battle of the sexes dragged out of the drawing room and into the outdoors, beginning with the heiress (Claudette Colbert) diving out of the yacht to join her beloved, "the pill of the century." (He flies in for their wedding in a bit modified by Renoir in La Règle du jeu.) Journalistic history on the make, the gruff reporter (Clark Gable) who finds himself sitting next to the runaway scoop aboard a Greyhound bus, brat and boor across the teeming Depression landscape. "That was free verse, you gas-house palooka!" Frank Capra has it all at his fingertips, emphasis on speed and luminosity. The socialite's father (Walter Connolly) thunders aloft in an airplane filled with detectives, the whoosh of the jet is heard in the next shot as the heroine awakens smilingly in a bungalow bed, ready for the day's adventures. The pleasures of donut-dunking and piggyback-riding are debated between aristocrats and plebeians, the communal singalong of "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" is the great leveler. The sharpie with his eyes on the reward (Roscoe Karns) is trounced with a reminder of Gable's gangster roles, bringing down the Walls of Jericho in the divided boudoir is a different matter. "You think you've got a great yarn and then something comes along and messes up the finish. And there you are." "Yeah. Where am I?" A bed of hay under the stars, a leg up on the hitchhiking lesson, Gable recounting a romantic dream on one side of the curtain while on the other Colbert bites her lip ardently. Capra saves a few beautiful transformations for the close, the tycoon who goes from choleric ogre to good fairy plus the plastic toy into Biblical trumpet into erotic instrument. "I wanna see what love looks like when it's triumphant." One year later Hitchcock has The 39 Steps. Cinematography by Joseph Walker. With Jameson Thomas, Alan Hale, Charles C. Wilson, Arthur Hoyt, Blanche Friderici and Ward Bond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |