Peter Warne, a hard-drinking reporter, meets a runaway heiress on a bus to New York — and their bickering journey becomes one of Hollywood’s great love stories.
In It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra, Clark Gable plays Peter Warne, a newspaper reporter who meets Ellie Andrews, played by Claudette Colbert, a wealthy heiress who has run away from her father and her new husband. They travel together by bus, sharing cheap rooms and meals, and Peter, who hopes to sell Ellie’s story, finds himself falling for her instead.
Gable is superb as Warne: funny, confident and a little rough around the edges. His scenes with Colbert, from the famous hitchhiking lesson to their night in a motel room divided by a blanket hung on a clothesline, the Walls of Jericho, are full of wit and tenderness. The film was a surprise success, and it helped define the screwball comedy.
It Happened One Night remains a landmark of romantic comedy, and Gable’s Peter Warne is one of his most charming performances: a man who starts out chasing a story and ends up finding something far more important.