This definitive screwball comedy had inauspicious beginnings in the "cross-country bus" genre of Depression-era films; its genius was in making its heroes get out and walk. All the elements of Capra's Americana are here in spontaneous, sporty form; Clark Gable's ace reporter Pete Warne is Mr. Deeds without an undershirt, making a complex case for the simple man in the mere act of dunking donuts. This he teaches to runaway heiress Claudette Colbert, with whom he spends more than one night. The now-famous "Walls of Jericho" motel-room scene raised a few eyebrows in the Hays Office, despite (or because of) Pete's protestation, "You see, I have no trumpet." It wasn't the censors, however, but the undershirt makers of America who were less than tickled by Gable's chest hairs. Sales of men's undershirts plummeted by thirty percent, and remained low until after the war when real men once again wore underwear, now on the outside. (JB)