“I was just wondering what makes dames like you so dizzy.” So queries Peter (Clark Gable), a crafty if unemployed newspaper writer, in It Happened One Night. He’s speaking to Ellie (Claudette Colbert), the missing heiress and potential story serving as his traveling companion, and he doesn’t get a definitive answer.
For that matter, Ellie isn’t particularly dizzy on the scale of screwball dames of the 1930s. She’s a little spoiled, sure, not especially wise to the ways of waiting in line with the common folk, and by her own admittance never before alone with a man. But within those parameters, she’s relatively levelheaded and frequently resourceful – she knows her way around hitchhiking, anyway – and Peter’s question seems especially rhetorical. Future would-be Gables asking future spoiled-but-smart heiresses the same question would have an easier answer: they probably derive their particular dizziness from It Happened One Night itself, a romantic comedy that’s now been influencing other movies for 90 years since its initial release in February 1934.
