It Happened One Night is considered quintessential screwball but it's tamer than most. "A simple story for simple people...That's my whole plot in a nutshell," says Clark Gable's Everyman, ace-reporter and sometime free-verse poet Pete Warne. Indeed, all the elements of Capra's Depression-era Americana are here but in spontaneous, sporty form. (The film had inauspicious beginnings in the "cross-country bus" genre of Depression-era films, but its genius was in making its heroes get out and walk.) Warne is Mr. Deeds without an undershirt, making a case for the simple man as against the "spoiled brat" runaway heiress Claudette Colbert. Roscoe Karns, as yet another great American type, "Mr. Believe-You-Me," speaks volumes about the class war when he spouts, "You look like you got class, yes sir, class with a capital K." As for the battle of the sexes, the now-famous "Walls of Jericho" in the motel room kidded the Hays Office while managing to raise a few eyebrows therein, despite-or because of-Pete's protestation, "You see, I have no trumpet."