Movie 86

It Happened One Night
(Frank Capra, 1934, b&w, 105 m.)

I went back to this legendary comedy, one of my favorites, to consider it against Bringing Up Baby (below). They are remarkably different, and at first I was surprised at how much more sophisticated the Howard Hawks movie looked.

Without doubt, Bringing Up Baby is a polished-perfect screwball comedy. If anything, the flaw is that it has no connection to reality. A rich young airhead falls in love with a bumbling young scientist and they have a weekend of silly adventures with a tame leopard (a gift sent from South America) and a wild one (escaped from a traveling circus), all in Connecticut, while her aunt’s dog hides a priceless brontosaurus bone. In the end, the rich aunt gives the scientist $1 million — yeah, that could happen. It’s also one of the talkiest films I ever watched, but held in check by the masterful playing of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Baby is like a huge bowl of caviar or a giant slice of baklava — not a meal but mouth-watering under the right circumstances.

By contrast, It Happened One Night seems almost accidentally good. It’s like a late-night snack of pizza and beer — only you can’t believe how good the pizza is (what’s that strange flavor? bitter melon?) and the beer is so light and easy. It’s also set smack in the middle of the Depression, so the story keeps bumping into people like moms who haven’t eaten for two days (to save the money) and highway thieves (who are taken for granted) who seem to make a living by stealing luggage.

The fish-out-of-water romance, now a Hollywood cliché, has a just-married runaway heiress falling in love with an out-of-work reporter, not her husband. She’s more spunky than scatterbrained; he’s a hunk but funny, too. He can tie a guy to a tree and take his car after a fistfight, but he also thinks about writing books on how to dunk donuts and how to hitchhike. Together they sing songs on an overnight bus and sleep on haystacks and get by on raw carrots — like a week at summer camp.

It’s also weirdly sexy. They do a lot of undressing in a motel room, usually with a ceremonial blanket in between, but sometimes right in front of each other, and often in moonlight. (In Bringing Up Baby Cary Grant has to put on Katherine Hepburn’s faux fur dressing gown in public. In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert wears Clark Gable’s pajamas. Guess which looks ridiculous and which looks intimate.) The continuous and masterful joke of the movie is how to tell whether two people in a motel room are married — or together. To track the surprising subtlety, notice two points: When do they kiss? And when does “It” happen and on which “Night”?

Finally, the movie has smoldering moments of silence. It Happened One Night is famously considered the first screwball comedy, and like many a prototype, it’s quirky, almost mysterious.

Movie 85

Bringing Up Baby
(Howard Hawks, 1938, b&w, 113 m.)

A universally acknowledged masterpiece and a signature example of screwball comedy. So fast, clever and madcap that you really cannot catch it all at once. As a result, it gets better with each viewing. The work of Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and director Howard Hawks — all of them — seems inhumanly creative. She produces laughs you have never heard anyone laugh before, nearly insane yet attractive. Grant ad libs and adds his own comic bits such as the hilarious torn-dress-exposing-underwear scene. Hawks often has Hepburn running back and forth across whole scenes, shows us a cute doggy rough-housing with an actual leopard, has old men doing wild animal noises, plus swinging ladders and crashing dinosaurs. Movies rarely get funnier.

Movie 84

Charade
(Stanley Donen, 1963, 113 m.)

A surprising disappointment. Prepared to re-watch a classic, I got a “vehicle.” As always, Audrey Hepburn is elegant beyond normal possibility and Cary Grant is graceful as a cat. But they only played themselves pretending to act. Supposedly her mysterious husband is mysteriously murdered and everybody says she will soon be next. Only the mysterious Cary Grant offers to help her. All in beautiful downtown Paris. Then four meanies chase her in an endless charade of false info and identities.

Remember how convincingly frightened Audrey Hepburn was in Wait Until Dark four years later? Forget that. Here she just keeps mooning over Cary Grant. (He is Cary Grant, except older.) She actually tells him over dinner that he’s faultless. Every time he confounds her with a new lie that frightens her into getting serious — for a few minutes — she quickly recovers to tell him yet again how she loves him — for a few more minutes. Imagine trying to warn Holly Golightly that she’s in imminent danger and you have this whole thing in its nutty shell. The worst moment comes when Grant, as a joke to distract her from trying yet again to get him into the sack, takes a long and thorough soap-and-water shower right before her eyes — fully clothed. This man is a seasoned international spy.

It was like watching a Rock Hudson & Doris Day movie with Alfred Hitchcock forced at gunpoint to direct the inane script. I was reminded of Holden Caulfield’s complaint in The Catcher in the Rye when he sees a Broadway show starring the then-famous Lunts. He sighs that they really are good, but you can tell that they know they are really good from start to finish.

You know something’s wrong when not one but both of the stars allow themselves to be squirted directly in the face with a water gun and then just smile at the little boy who did it. That happens in a sophisticated outdoor restaurant on a cold winter’s day. In the first scene. Gosh, superstars can be such good sports!

I blame Stanley Donen, who apparently thought he was directing yet another musical dance extravaganza. Even the titles … Sorry, I’ll stop. I was just so disappointed.

Movie 83

Clueless
Amy Heckerling, 1995, 97 m.)

In contrast to Charade, this movie is a flat-out joy: Smart as hell, pretending to be dumb. This movie is the child of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (same director) and surely one of the forebears of Legally Blonde.

But with its own indecipherable language, it’s also the apparent source of Brick, a high school film noir! (If you missed Brick, which came out three years ago, give it a try.)

Director Heckerling has publicly admitted modeling the story on Jane Austen’s novel, Emma, but she actually had the story, anyway, and only later tweaked it to match up with Austen. This story of a smarter-than-she-looks Valley Girl is well worth a second — or first — look.

Movie 82

My Cousin Vinny
(Jonathan Lynn, 1992, 120 minutes)

I got the sudden flash one day that this movie and Legally Blonde (2001) were twin movies by a different director, so I decided to watch it again. I’ve loved the movie from the start. It’s ridiculous and zany with a small and excellent cast. Partly screwball comedy, partly social-class commentary, it’s also a joke on courtroom systems — the British director has a law degree — and even quietly dismantles the cliché of Southern rednecks. Actually, the movie doesn’t have a mean bone in it, not even a villain. Good fun from start to finish, with a clever courtroom climax and the pleasing surprise of Marisa Tomei, who won a (controversial) best supporting actress Oscar as the cute dirty-talking general automotive expert.

Full disclosure: One reason I find this movie so hilarious is that amid all the utterly ridiculous clothes that Joe Pesci wears, a running joke in the story, he has two grotesque neckties I also happen to own. True, I bought mine as jokes, but still. I felt vaguely honored.

Oh, and if you don’t believe that My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde are pretty much the same movie, that’s OK by me. (One’s about a Brooklyn lawyer in Alabama and one’s about a California sorority girl at Harvard.) But look for yourself. You’ll be amazed.

Nick Otten is assistant director in the Theater Program at Clayton High School and adjunct professor in the graduate Communications MAT Program at Webster University. He consumes vast quantities of books and movies. In his description of Nick's List, he says,  "For every single work, I’ll quickly post a brief commentary — each week, at least 1 book and 2 movies, usually more. Maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. Sometimes, not often, I may go crazy and write some kind of extra, a page or so, on some movie or pair of movies or some genre, actor, or something else, or how one book relates to another or a movie or you or me or us. Such stuff will be just one click away, guaranteed." If you want to reach Nick, rather than comment on the articles, contact Beacon features and commentary editor Donna Korando.

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