It Happened One Night

This here’s a screwball comedy that throws some real curves: most particularly a leggy Claudette Colbert and a shirtless Clark Gable. Cheeky Colbert plays a runaway heiress on a bus north to find her fiancé; instead she finds fellow traveler Gable, an ace reporter with everything but an assignment. The repartee (written by Robert Riskin, who won an Oscar for the screenplay) is faster than a Greyhound on the interstate and the sexy innuendos barely outraced the censors, but Frank Capra’s Depression-era romp has no shortage of employable humor. Watch for the “Walls of Jericho” gag acknowledging that sheets happen.