In the week it’s been announced a fourth entry in this series Mad About the Boy is due for imminent production, it’s incredible to think that it has been going for close to a quarter of a century. The first adaptation in what became a franchise was released twenty-three years ago today.
Helen Fielding’s hit 1996 novel was a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice and became a cultural milestone. A film adaptation was inevitable.
If the search for the iconic and beloved 32-year old slacker singleton heroine wasn’t quite that for Scarlett O’Hara it seemed of almost national import so the casting of the very un-British Renee Zellweger caused a ripple of consternation but it turned out to be an inspired choice.
She allegedly gained twenty pounds to play Bridget who notes her weight daily in her diary and struggles into her clothes with the help of very big pants.
The meta-casting of Colin Firth, TV’s Darcy from the BBC’s global hit adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, as Bridget’s love object human rights lawyer Mark Darcy, hit the sweet spot. It also meant Firth could send himself up and move on from the typecasting that had followed that other iconic role.
That TV series’ screenwriter Andrew Davies co-wrote the screenplay with Fielding and her onetime boyfriend, romcom king Richard Curtis.
Hugh Grant delighted as the devilish Daniel Cleaver, the rival for Bridget’s affections.
Directed by Sharon ‘Shazza’ Maguire, Fielding’s BFF and immortalised in the film by Sally Phillips, one of the posse helping Bridget through her trials and tribulations, the film was a huge hit and a critical success.
Zellweger was nominated for an Academy Award for her charming performance. Long live Bridget Jones!
Why can’t we simulate a girl? Nerdy social outcast Shermer High School students Gary Wallace (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt Donnelly (Ilan Mitchell Smith) are humiliated by senior jocks Ian (Robert Downey Jr.) and Max (Robert Rusler) for swooning over their cheerleader girlfriends Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson). Humiliated and disappointed at their direction in life and wanting more than being shamed in the school gymnasium, Gary convinces the uptight Wyatt that they need a boost of popularity in order to get their crushes away from Ian and Max. Alone for the weekend with Wyatt’s parents gone for a couple of days, Gary is inspired by watching the 1931 classic Frankenstein on TV to create a virtual woman using Wyatt’s computer, infusing her with everything they can conceive to make the perfect dream woman. After hooking electrodes to a doll and hacking into a Government computer system for more power, a power surge creates Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) an astonishingly beautiful and intelligent woman with the power to transmogrify. She quickly procures a pink 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible to take the boys to a Blues bar in Chicago where she uses her powers to get fake IDs for Gary and Wyatt. They return home drunk where Chet (Bill Paxton) Wyatt’s mean older brother, extorts $175 for his silence. Lisa agrees to keep herself hidden away from him but realises that Gary and Wyatt are very uptight and need to seriously unwind. After another humiliating experience at the mall where Ian and Max pour a cherry Icee on Gary and Wyatt in front of a crowd, Lisa tells the bullies about a party at Wyatt’s house, before driving off in a Porsche 928 she conjured for Gary. Despite Wyatt’s protests, Lisa insists that the party happens in order to loosen the boys up. She meet Gary’s parents, Al (Britt Leach) and Lucy (Barbara Lang) are shocked and dismayed at the things she says and her frank manner. Gary explains her away as an exchange student. After she pulls a gun on Al and Lucy (which is later revealed to be a water pistol) she alters their memories so Lucy forgets about the conflict but Al forgets that they had a son altogether. At the Donnelly house, the party has spun out of control while Gary and Wyatt take refuge in the bathroom, where they resolve to have a good time, despite having embarrassed themselves in front of Deb and Hilly. Then the house is invaded … We can deal with shame. Death is a much deeper issue. Bizarre even in the annals of Eighties comedy, this outlier in the John Hughes universe is remarkably charmless, tasteless and crude. What begins as a teen high school comedy descends quickly into a sex fantasy that is an equal opportunities offender despite the sweetness of the woman of many a man’s dreams driving the story. Adapted from a Fifties magazine story Made of the Future by Al Feldstein, Hughes’ screenplay makes these boys grow up way too fast and Hall’s take on black language proves embarrassing forty years on (and even back then). This battle of the sexes is really just a trawl through sexist tropes which makes watching these kids grow up overnight a lot harder to tolerate. Hughes was so good at the proclivities and sensitivities of teens – clearly the boys have lousy parents and Smith even has Paxton as a vicious older brother so friendship and mutual victimhood unites them. How can two people have the same dream? However none of the ideas clicks. Even the minor presence of Robert Downey (as he’s billed) in the ensemble doesn’t assist the plot or tone. The film’s final half hour effectively renders the entire premise redundant and the Risky Business conclusion is the closest this gets to decency. So inexplicable they even use a colorised clip of Frankenstein and the jukebox soundtrack is hardly up to Hughes’ usual standards. Horror fans will get a kick out of Michael Berryman as a mutant biker though and the clothes are great! Lisa is everything I wanted in a girl before I knew what I wanted
Neophyte screenwriter J.D. Lawton’s script 3000 was a dark tale of prostitution that was transformed in a fairytale makeover with director Garry Marshall. Somehow, as Hollywood Boulevard’s happy hooker, Julia Roberts did an Audrey Hepburn star-making turn and charmed audiences everywhere, rendering this the highest grossing romcom of all time. Richard Gere as the corporate raider who hires the smartass streetwalker as an escort for the week embellished his own repertoire with a comic nous previously underexploited. Naturally, they change each other for the better and only a fool couldn’t guess what happens next when two of the world’s most beautiful spend the night together in a penthouse suite. It’s all done with a ravishing lightness of touch. Were sex and shopping ever such an attractive combination?
Aka Ariane. I always tell you what I’m doing, but you never tell me what you’re doing. Paris. Young cello student Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) eavesdrops on a conversation between her father, Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier) a widowed private detective who specializes in tracking unfaithful spouses, and his client, Monsieur X (John McGiver). After Claude gives his client proof of his wife’s daily trysts with American business magnate Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) in Room 14 at the Ritz Hotel, Monsieur X announces he will shoot Flannagan later that evening. Claude is nonchalant, regretting only the business he will lose, since Flannagan is a well-known international playboy with a long history of casual affairs. When Ariane cannot get the Ritz to put her through to Flannagan on the phone, and the police decline to intervene until after a crime has been committed, she decides to warn him herself, and leaves for the hotel. When Monsieur X breaks into Flannagan’s hotel suite, he finds Flannagan with Ariane – not his wife (Lise Bourdin), carefully making her escape on an outside ledge. Flannagan is intrigued by the mysterious girl, who refuses to give him any information about herself, even her name. He starts guessing her name from the initial A on her handbag, and when she declines to tell him he resorts to calling her thin girl. She has no romantic history but pretends to be a femme fatale to interest him, and soon falls in love with the considerably older man. She agrees to meet him the next afternoon, not mentioning that she has orchestral practice in the evenings. She arrives with mixed feelings but spends the evening while waiting for him to leave for the airport. Ariane’s father, who has tried unsuccessfully to protect her from knowing about the tawdry domestic surveillance details in his files, notices her change of mood but has no idea that it proceeds from one of his cases. A year later, Flannagan returns to Paris and the Ritz. Ariane, who has kept track of Flannagan’s womanising exploits through the news media, meets him again when she sees him at an opera while surveying the crowd from a balcony. She puts herself in his path in the lobby, and they start seeing each other again … He who loves and runs away, lives to love another day. The first of twelve collaborations between Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, this sprightly adaptation of Claude Anet’s 1920 novel Ariane, jeune fille russe is in fact the fourth screen version of the story, the second of which (1932) had a screenplay co-written by Wilder and the third which supposedly inspired this was made in Germany in 1931 by Paul Czinner. The attraction for Wilder is clearly in the potential for making a film along the lines of his hero Ernst Lubitsch with his fabled ‘touch’ and aside from the judicious use of eavesdropping (a suggestive trope Lubitsch loved), key to this is the casting. For Wilder, Hepburn was kissed by the angels and it was their second film following Sabrina. She shines here as the music student with ideas beyond those of the older men around her, curiosity stoked by those amorous files in her father’s office. According to her biographer Alexander Walker, there were alterations to the screenplay, so “Wilder had a heroine who behaved with the serene composure of a self-confident schoolgirl. It would work, he was sure. Truant and pert, Audrey bubbles along, sticking her oval chin out as if to invite love, the putting up her guard just in time.” Cooper remains an epic iteration of masculinity but wasn’t Wilder’s first choice – that would have been Cary Grant, who never agreed to appear in any of his productions. He comes to Paris every year and I always know because my business improves noticeably. Cooper, however was affable company for a location shoot in a city Wilder loved that had given him respite and a career after fleeing Nazi Germany. It was their second collaboration too because in 1938 Cooper had appeared for Lubitsch as another womaniser in France in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife on which Wilder had done some writing and that had also marked his first collaboration with previous writing partner and producer Charles Brackett. Now he tailored Cooper’s role more specifically to how he appeared twenty years later. There was a problem, though. “The day I cast Cooper, he got old,” Wilder told Charlotte Chandler. For Chevalier this gave him his first non-singing screen role in a decade. It restored his popularity following his conduct during the war – like many in the French film industry, he agreed to work in tandem with the occupying Germans. He wasn’t especially popular on set however, and Wilder left him out of the cocktails he hosted each evening (just as he had done with Humphrey Bogart on Sabrina). In Paris, people make love – well, perhaps not better, but certainly more often. They do it any time, any place. On the left bank, on the right bank, and in between! They do it by day, and they do it by night. The butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker. They do it in motion, they do it sitting absolutely still. Poodles do it. Tourists do it. Generals do it. Once in a while even existentialists do it. There is young love, and old love. Married love, and illicit love. It was a tricky shoot not merely because of unseasonable weather and mosquitoes but also because of the street demonstrations and violence in Paris following the Russian invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis, forcing Wilder to speed up filming and organise evacuation plans if the worst occurred. The amoral tale is softened somewhat by the use of music and songs, almost as melodrama (in the original meaning) including Charles Trenet’s L’ame Des Poètes, Henri Betti’s C’est si bon and Fascination, a motif which is hummed throughout the film by Ariane in a score supervised by Franz Waxman and played by those obliging gypsies who also serve as a Greek chorus, discreetly disappearing when the action hots up. Cooper’s advancing age (56) and haggard appearance (he would have a full face lift two years later) made this stylish and witty exploration of sex a hard sell in the US market where the straightforward philandering didn’t go down well at a time when Lolita had just been published. However the content is mitigated by that lightness of touch that disguises discomfort while Hepburn performs beautifully as the naive daughter opposite Chevalier as her concerned father and of course Cooper who is taken in by her assumed identity in a story of double standards and hypocrisy. And a coda was added to the American production to make things right. You could fly in the twins from Stockholm. Hepburn remarked that the enterprise might have made more sense had the men’s roles been swapped. She discarded the possibility of playing Gigi on the big screen in part because Chevalier was in the cast – that twinkle in his eye didn’t seem paternal at all. She was drinking too much during production and presumed guilt led to a bout of the anorexia that plagued her. She’s a very peculiar girl. Not my type at all. As is the custom with Hepburn’s roles, there’s a fairy tale transformation here but it’s really that of Flannagan’s Don Juan – albeit there’s a fun reference to Cinderella when Ariane mislays her shoe in his hotel room. You know who I am, Mr. Flannagan, I’m the girl in the afternoon. Hepburn was outfitted by Hubert de Givenchy (and an uncredited Jay A. Morley) but her hairdo was altered from her previous urchin look in Funny Face with a centre parting introduced to a soft pageboy bob by Grazia di Rossi. She retained the look off the set, which caused quite the fashion brouhaha, and the Yorkie, Mr. Famous, which absent real life husband Mel Ferrer had bought to keep her company and wound up having a co-starring role here. The tiny creature gets smacked so much! For all its issues and complications, this is an irresistible, seductive, tart, wistfully romantic and sophisticated delight with an absurdly moving ending (plus that coda to emphasise a morally correct conclusion). And isn’t the Saul Bass poster ingenious? We did have a good time, didn’t we?
A day for desperate women. Successful Boston real estate stager Anna Brady (Amy Adams) is frustrated that her long term boyfriend cardiologist Jeremy Sloane (Adam Scott) still has not proposed to her after four years. She decides to travel from to Dublin to propose to him on February 29, Leap Day, while he is attending a conference. Anna plans to invoke an Irish tradition, when a woman may propose to a man on leap day. During the flight, a storm diverts the plane to Cardiff in Wales. Anna hires a boat to take her west across the Irish Sea to Cork. The severity of the storm results in her being put ashore at a small seaside village of Dingle. Anna requests surly Irish innkeeper Declan O’Callaghan (Matthew Goode) to give her a lift to Dublin. At first he refuses, but as his tavern is threatened with foreclosure, he agrees to drive her for 500 euros. Along the way, he mocks her belief in a leap year tradition of women proposing to men. A herd of cows blocks the road. Anna steps in cow dung while attempting to move the animals and tries to clean her shoes while leaning on Declan’s car, which causes it to roll downhill into a stream. Continuing on foot, Anna flags down a van with three travellers who offer her a lift. Ignoring Declan’s warning, Anna hands them her luggage. They drive off without her. Anna and Declan make their way on foot to a roadside pub, where they find the thieves going through Anna’s luggage. Declan fights them and retrieves Anna’s bag. While waiting for a train in Tipperary, they ask each other what they would grab if their homes were on fire and they had only 60 seconds to flee. They lose track of time and miss the train. They are forced to stay at a B&B where they pretend to be married so that their conservative hosts will allow them to stay. During dinner, when the other couples kiss to show their love for each other, Anna and Declan are forced to kiss as well … Why don’t you try and stop trying to control everything in the known universe? The screenplay by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont unearths a previously unknown Oirish custom called ‘Bachelor’s Day’ throwing together two mismatched romantic protagonists into a tiny car (of a marque last seen in Ireland maybe forty years ago) and hurtling them around the country in a screwball road movie that hits more posts than goals in terms of plausibility or indeed verisimilitude. A cast of redoubtable local performers including Pat Laffan, Alan Devlin, Ian McElhinney and Dominique McElligott do their best with mindless if inoffensive comedy (if you’re not Irish) and the scenery as shot by Newton Thomas Sigel is curiously muddy throughout. Made variously in Counties Wicklow, Dublin, Mayo Galway and Kildare, filming took place in and around the Aran Islands (Caragh’s Inn in Kilmurvey on Inishmore) and Dun Aonghasa Cliffs, Connemara, Temple Bar, Georgian Dublin, the Rock of Dunamase in County Laois, Enniskerry and Glendalough National Park in Wicklow, Carton House Hotel in County Kildare and Olaf Street in Waterford City. A romcom that never rises above the sum of its parts but certainly provides a lens into the tourist view of the island. It’s so bad it’s enjoyable and has become a major cult. This eventually bounces along with a fun soundtrack of popular songs in a score by Randy Edelman. Directed by Anand Tucker. You just surprised me. You keep doing that
Hard to believe but one of our favourite films turns a shocking 38 years old today! How many ways to love it? It’s a high school movie so there’s a prom. The characters, for sure, especially – of course! – The Duck! His masochistic crush on Andie is just soul crushing. The music – were songs ever more crucial than in our teens? The clothes. Ah, the clothes. A perfect capsule of Eighties geek chic. Andie’s relationship with her father, the great Harry Dean Stanton. The dilemma of being a social outcast but being asked out by the only richie you could ever fancy who turns out to be a nice guy. Did anyone have a greater understanding of adolescence than the late great writer/producer John Hughes? We think not, except perhaps Nicholas Ray. Howard Deutch carried out directing duties here. Happy Birthday to Pretty in Pink!
John had been wanting to write something for me, and he often used song titles for his projects since most of what he wrote was inspired by music. He wrote Pretty in Pink in between Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club and based it loosely around the Psychedelic Furs song. At that point in my life I also just really liked pink—Andie’s room was basically modeled after my own. The prop people even took a collage from my personal bedroom and used it in the movie for Andie’s room, if that tells you anything. Molly Ringwald speaking about John Hughes in Vogue, March 2021
Yes, we know the Christian martyr was a Roman saint who suffered for his decency – tortured and beheaded for marrying Christian couples in defiance of Emperor Claudius II. And yet we’re all still suckers for the patron of beekeeping and epilepsy since the day has been commercialised into hearts and flowers and all that good stuff. There are bits of him all over the place – his skull decorated with flowers can be seen at the Basilica of Santa Maria, Cosmedin, Rome, while other relics lie at St Anton’s Church in Madrid, the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul in Prague and at the Whitefriar Carmelite Church in Dublin among other romantic destinations. And on that uplifting note … prepare to swoon!
I’ll date his brains out. Montauk, New York. 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is an Uber driver and bartender at a seafood joint. As she owes property taxes on the childhood home she inherited from her late mother, her car is repossessed and she faces bankruptcy. Her ex Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) turns up to tow her car for non-payment of unaffordable property taxes and she sees it parked as she rollerskates to work and gets arrested attempting to steal it. Her surfing lawyer Gabe Sawyer (Zahn McClarnon) bails her out at court and warns her to stay out of trouble. Desperate to keep the home, a piece of real estate so valuable old classmate Doug Khan (Hasan Mihaj) tries to get her to give him the sale. She reminds him of his scandalous sex history with a teacher. Her friends Sara (Natalie Morales) and Jim (Scott MacArthur) are pregnant and hard up and thinking of moving to Florida. Sara points out a weird posting on Craigslist and Maddie feels forced to consider it even though she’s not a prositute. Wealthy couple Alison (Laura Benanti) and Laird Becker (Matthew Broderick) ask her to date their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a Buick Regal. Since Percy is shy and has had no experiences with girls, drinking, parties, or sex, his parents hope to boost his confidence before he attends Princeton otherwise he will be hopelessly out of his depth. Maddie attempts to seduce Percy at the animal shelter where he volunteers and she pretends to be interested in adopting a dog but when she offers him a ride home, he thinks that she is attempting to kidnap him and pepper sprays her. Despite this, they agree to go on a real date the following day. Maddie and Percy meet at a bar the next night where one of her exes spills the dirt on her and Maddie introduces Percy to alcohol. Then they go skinny dipping at the beach. While they are in the water, a group of drunken teenagers steal their clothes. Maddie fights them in the nude, frightening Percy, who refuses to have sex with her. When she tries to leave without him, he jumps on her car naked and they outrun the local police. She and Percy try to have sex back at her house but he develops an anxiety rash so Maddie takes care of him. Maddie and Percy continue to date, sharing more about themselves and forming a friendship. He arranges to meet his former nanny but it turns out to be a manny named Jody (Kyle Mooney) and he’s jealous of Maddie because he wants to have sex with Percy too. Maddie and Percy confide in each other that they never went to prom. Maddie never went because her father didn’t respond to her requests to get to know him and that morning a letter arrived marked Return to Sender. He was a guy from the city where he lived with his real family and paid off her mother and ignored Maddie altogether. So they imitate a prom night, going to a fancy dinner where Percy plays the piano – he learned Maneater especially for Maddie. Percy meets an acquaintance from school, Natalie (Amalia Yoo) who’s going to Princeton too and she invites him to a party that night. After he and Maddie disagree about their long-term plans, he goes to the party while Maddie searches for him. She finds him with Natalie in bed, though nothing happened between them, after he took a painkiller with alcohol. After he and Maddie are asked to leave the party Percy confesses his love for Maddie. The next day, Percy tells his parents he wants to stay in Montauk with Maddie instead of going to Princeton … Need a car? Date our son. A return to mainstream non-superhero films for Academy Award-winner and newly married wife and mother Lawrence sees her in this Eighties/ Oughties sex comedy with the bonus of full-frontal nudity – hers. As the older woman educating a diffident younger man she has fun in this breezy if frank romp, high on the star’s charms in a screenplay co-written by director Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips and apparently derived from a real world ad found by the film’s producers. It’s a well-worn story of a sentimental education but told knowingly, referencing everything from The Graduate to The Affair. In a script riddled with ribaldry and lewdness there are lots of good throwaway lines here – such as when Maddie and Sara inform Jim about the different kinds of one night stand a girl can have and when Percy has to have a talk with his parents while he acts as ‘the parents.’ His persistent abstinence is the perfect comic foil to Maddie’s sex drive. However as clever and funny as it is, the mystery persists as to why an A-list actress and producer would do full frontal nudity as Lawrence does here – albeit in an action scene after an open water coitus interruptus that Percy says reminds him of the beginning of Jaws. In the end it all revolves around property – location, pricing, ownership and the hold it has on people. That this ends on a road trip diffuses the issues of identity, class and money that this story is really about. It’s as if Benjamin drove off with Mrs Robinson, which is what should have happened. Isn’t it? Watch out for Achilles-Andreas of Greece (ie almost royalty, not since 1973, natch) in the small role of ‘Teen,’ These people use us so why don’t we use them?
Three fathers?! San Forino, a village in Italy. Carla ‘Campbell’ (Gina Lollobrigida) is an Italian woman who as a 16-year old twenty years earlier during the American occupation of Italy in WW2 slept with three American GIs in the course of 10 days, Cpl. Phil Newman (Phil Silvers), Lt. Justin Young (Peter Lawford) and Sgt. Walter Braddock (Telly Savalas). By the time she discovers she is pregnant, all three have moved on, and she, uncertain of which is the father, convinces each of the three (who are unaware of the existence of the other two) to support ‘his’ daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) financially over the years. To protect her reputation, as well as the reputation of her child, Carla has raised the girl to believe her mother is the widow of a non-existent army captain named Eddie Campbell, a name she borrowed from a can of soup (otherwise he would have been Captain Coca-Cola, the only other term she knew in English at the time). She shares her bed nowadays with Vittorio (Philippe Leroy) who works in her vineyard and she lives in a very nice house with a housekeeper and Gia is coming home from college. Now the three ex-airmen are attending a unit-wide reunion of the 293rd Squadron of the 15th Air Force in the village where they were stationed. The men are accompanied by their wives, Shirley Newman (Shelley Winters), Lauren Young (Marian Moses) and Fritzie Braddock (Lee Grant). In the Newmans’ case they are accompanied by their three fairly obnoxious boys. Carla is forced into a series of comic situations as she tries to keep them – each one anxious to meet his daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) for the first time – from discovering her secret while at the same time trying to keep Gia from running off to Paris to be with a much older married lecturer who will take her to Brazil. When confronted, Mrs. Campbell admits she does not know which of the three men is Gia’s father … I’m only one woman but my heart aches for three. Now more obvious as a source for the bonkers story of ABBA musical Mamma Mia! and its subsequent film adaptations, this expensive and smoothly told romcom from the camera-pen of Melvin Frank boasts a ridiculously good ensemble, fabulous locations and an enviable number of good lines in a characterful story. We paid more war damages than Germany. There are three terrific performances from the wives too, in a shrewdly cast lineup with contrasting physical and acting styles on display. At the centre of it all is La Lollo, trying to balance an impossible situation that is playful and funny with some decent slapstick and mastery of tone. It’s beautifully shot around Lazio and Rocca Catonera as well as Cinecitta Studios by Gabor Pogany. Riz Ortolani’s score keeps everything bouncing along including that title song performed by Jimmy Roselli. Co-written by Dennis Norden and Sheldon Keller, this is bright and enjoyable from beginning to end, even if there’s a necessarily quasi-sentimental conclusion. In Snow White the other dwarfs knew about each other
I want to see what love looks like when it’s triumphant. I haven’t had a good laugh in a week. Spoiled heiress Ellen ‘Ellie’ Andrews (Claudette Colbert) has eloped with pilot and fortune-hunter King Westley (Jameson Thomas) against the wishes of her extremely wealthy father, Wall Street legend Alexander Andrews (Walter Connolly), who wants to have the marriage annulled because he knows that Westley is really interested only in Ellie’s money. Jumping ship in Florida, Ellie runs away and boards a Greyhound to New York City (driven by Ward Bond) to reunite with her husband. First she has to fend off the attentions of fellow passenger Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) – Shapeley’s the name and that’s the way I like ’em! then she meets Peter Warne (Clark Gable) a renegade newspaper reporter who recently lost his job. Soon, Peter recognises her and gives her a choice. If she gives him an exclusive on her story, he will help her reunite with Westley. If not, he will tell her father where she is. Ellie agrees to help. As they go through several adventures, Ellie loses her initial disdain for Peter and they begin to fall in love. When the bus breaks down and they begin hitchhiking, they fail to secure a ride until Ellie displays a shapely leg to Danker (Alan Hale), the next driver who has a taste for singing behind the wheel. When they stop en route, Danker attempts to steal their luggage but Peter chases him down and seizes his Model T. I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb. Near the end of their journey, Ellie confesses her love to Peter. The owners of the motel in which they stay, Zeke (Arthur Hoyt) and his wife (Blanche Friderici) notice that Peter’s car is gone and then expel Ellie. Believing Peter has deserted her, Ellie telephones her father, who agrees to let her marry Westley. Meanwhile, Peter has obtained money from his editor Joe Gordon (Charles C. Wilson) to marry Ellie but he misses her on the road … What’s holding up the annulment, you slowpoke? The walls of Jericho are toppling! A Pre-Code comedy that was sensationally rewarded with the five major Academy Awards this put Columbia Studios into the big leagues. Latterly acknowledged as one of the four foundational films of screwball, Robert Riskin’s adaptation of the 1933 short story Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams hums with good ideas and great dialogue and the casting is inspired but as is often the case the stars were effectively the last people anyone expected in the role after several actresses either rejected the script or were rejected and Colbert had not enjoyed her previous experience working with director Frank Capra when she made her first film, For the Love of Mike. She did it for $50,000 and a four-week shoot so she could go on vacation. She had to be dragged off a train to receive her Oscar when her win was announced. Gable was on loan from MGM as punishment. Neither liked the script – ironic, considering that setpieces like the hitchhiking, donut dunking, the Walls of Jericho and the trumpet (a sly nod to the new rules about sex on the screen) are now part of movie parlance. Behold the walls of Jericho! Uh, maybe not as thick as the ones that Joshua blew down with his trumpet, but a lot safer. You see, uh, I have no trumpet. Now just to show you my heart’s in the right place, I’ll give you my best pair of pyjamas. The origins of the term ‘screwball’ are often disputed but there’s a clue in one exchange between Alexander Andrews and Pete: Do you love her? /A normal human being couldn’t live under the same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!/ I asked you a simple question! Do you love her? / YES! But don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself! The first run was neither a critical nor a commercial success but the second release across the country made the romantic road movie a huge hit. Its effect rippled across the culture: Gable’s stripping down to reveal a bare chest allegedly created a crisis in the garment industry because he wasn’t wearing an undershirt. With its jibes about bankers, newspapers, rich people and romance, this appealed across the board to a Depression-era audience. Macho Gable tickles in all the right places while Colbert’s stardom was also sealed with her charming portrayal of the headstrong runaway heiress. His machismo is matched by her sophistication. Connolly too is excellent as the no-flies father. It all gave director Capra a swelled head however and his future collaborations with the great screenwriter Riskin (whose signature film this surely is) were far more self-important. Riskin’s place in Hollywood history has never been challenged, except of course by Capra, his long-term collaborator, who would call his own memoirs The Name Above the Title in a bid to resuscitate an ailing career in an era driven by auteur directors. This publication had the unfortunate effect of casting doubt on Riskin’s huge contribution to that Name; Riskin was long dead by then and therefore not capable of defending his role in the consolidation of Capra’s self-mythologising. Ironically, their collaborative ventures had always called attention to the great American theme of reinvention. The continuities and discontinuities within that director’s career are always linked to those suggested by Riskin’s screenplays, despite Capra’s cinematic achievements prior to their professional marriage; but as Tom Stempel points out in the seminal FrameWork, “what Riskin did was develop the material, provide the frame, that Capra could use to show his talents on” (Continuum, 1988: 104). For anyone truly interested in their complex and fascinating relationship read Ian Scott’s brilliant In Capra’s Shadow, one of the best books ever about screenwriting. In the meantime, this is a sunny, funny delight from start to finish. Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined
mondomovies 