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[...] the somewhat submerged pattern hinted at by Connolly and, I think, adopted by Capra (for a number of reasons) as a part of the skeleton of It Happened One Night is the romance: not the Shakespearean romance, mentioned briefly by Cavell (p. 19), which modern scholars now see as deeply respectful of "the woman's part" in working out plots of reconciliation, education, and growth,5 but a version of the Hollywood romance, featuring not a "pantywaist" but an adventurous man with "dragons to slay" (to use Connolly's words), and a woman who is beautiful and worth pursuing, but otherwise helpless when left to her own devices.\n I6 I do not want to deny that the presentation of Ellie as a magically entrancing idealized woman is a powerful and perfectly evocative image for Capra's purposes. 18 But praise of the philosophical profundity, comic genius, and enduring entertainment value of It Happened One Night cannot afford to overlook that the fashioning of its heroine involved the sacrifice of so many admirable qualités - practical experience, improvisatory skill, independent strength, self-knowledge, and sexual maturity among others - possessed by the fictional character she was based on.

From Heroine to Brat: Frank Capra's Adaptation of Night Bus (It Happened One Night)

Although it opened to a relatively quiet reception, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) quickly gained both popular and critical acclaim. Shot in only about one month's time and featuring two actors, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, who would much rather have been elsewhere, the film nevertheless turned out to be, according to some critics, "better than it has any right to be."1 It is enjoyed and respected as one of the first grown-up love stories of American cinema, witty and realistic rather than bound to already stale Hollywood clichés. In his introduction to the screenplay, for example, John Gassner notes that "Its adult approach to love was a welcome departure from saccharine romance. . . . It Happened One Night proved a signpost on Hollywood's journey from adolescence to maturity."2

Perhaps the highest and most intelligent praise has come recently from Stanley Cavell. In his study Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell examines what he calls "The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage" and claims that the best of what are often simply referred to as screwball comedies are deeply "bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women."3 The films of this genre, he says, present "parables" of the struggle for "the reciprocity of equality of consciousness between a woman and a man" (p. 17). In It Happened One Night, "an essential goal of the narrative is the education of the woman, where her education turns out to mean her acknowledgement of her desire, and this in turn will be conceived of as her creation, her emergence, at any rate, as an autonomous human being" (p. 84). Cavell's critical praise is stirring, but takes on a somewhat ironic edge when we note that in many ways it is a better description of the story on which the film is based than of the film itself. A comparative analysis of It Happened One Night and Samuel Hopkins Adams's "Night Bus" (1933), from which Robert Riskin wrote the screenplay, dramatizes the extent to which the film reconceives the woman of the story and exhibits a nervous uncertainty - far more than the story - about what Cavell calls "the comedy of equality" (p. 82).

Before we look at the specifics of the comparison, it may be worth glancing quickly at what Capra himself (in his autobiography The Name Above the Title) tells about how he, Riskin, and My les Connolly agonized over the adaptation process, and how they resolved their difficulties in coming up with what they felt was a workable screenplay of a story that Capra was initially attracted to because "It had the smell of novelty."4 Responding to an early version of the script which was being turned down by an ever-growing list of actresses, Connolly remarked:

Sure you've got some good comedy routines, but your leading characters are nonsympathetic, non interest-grabbing. People can't identify with them. Take your girl: a spoiled brat, a rich heiress. How many spoiled heiresses do people know? And how many give a damn what happens to them? She's a zero. Take your leading man: a long-haired, flowing-tie, Greenwich Village painter. I don't know any vagabond painters, and I doubt if you do. And the man I don't know is a man I'm apt to dislike, especially if he has no ideals, no worms, no dragons to slay. Another zero. And when zero meets zero you've got zero interest.

Now. Your girl. Don't let her be a brat because she's an heiress, but because she's bored with being an heiress. More sympathetic. And the man. Forget that panty-waist painter. Make him a guy we all know and like. Maybe a tough, crusading reporter - at outs with his pig-headed editor. More sympathetic. And when he meets the spoiled heiress - well, it's THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. But the shrew must be worth taming, and the guy that tames her must be one of us (p. 164).

After Capra discussed these criticisms with Riskin - who commented "What chumps we are!" - they "rewrote the whole story in a week" (p. 164).

Note how the concern for creating sympathetic and identifiable characters and situations - trademarks of Capra throughout his career - looms large here and pushes the film towards easily recognizable conventions, several of which are obvious and one of which is somewhat submerged. First, the bohemian painter (originally a witty and spirited but not particularly physically imposing inventor in Adams's story) must become the tough reporter, already familiar to audiences through various popular films, including Capra's own Platinum Blond (1931). Though I will not spend much time on this change, it is certainly related to the corresponding transformation of the woman from an assertive to a helpless, rather powerless figure. Next, the reference to The Taming of the Shrew instantly gives shape to the plot by invoking not only a well-known play but also, to use the term a bit loosely, a traditional ideology: a far-reaching system of ideas about what women are, want, and need, and how men should go about giving all this to them. Finally, the somewhat submerged pattern hinted at by Connolly and, I think, adopted by Capra (for a number of reasons) as a part of the skeleton of It Happened One Night is the romance: not the Shakespearean romance, mentioned briefly by Cavell (p. 19), which modern scholars now see as deeply respectful of "the woman's part" in working out plots of reconciliation, education, and growth,5 but a version of the Hollywood romance, featuring not a "pantywaist" but an adventurous man with "dragons to slay" (to use Connolly's words), and a woman who is beautiful and worth pursuing, but otherwise helpless when left to her own devices. All this information does not of course completely explain why It Happened One Night took the shape it did, but may at least provide some general background for a study of how the story was reworked for the film.

There are a great many details - only some of which I'll survey - that dramatize how Capra modifies the character of Ellie (Elspeth in the story) and her relationship with Peter Warne. The story and the film, of course, have much in common. Early in the story Adams, like Capra, presents Elspeth as a spoiled young hieress, describing her as a "helpless little hick" (p. 42), an "outraged empress" (p. 44), and possessed of "an imperious temper" (p. 37). Believing that "People always wait for me" (p. 40), she is "willful, self-centered" (p. 55), and generally oblivious to the economic realities that afflict less privileged inhabitants of Depression America which Adams (unlike Capra) repeatedly describes. As damning as this may seem, though, Elspeth moves very quickly away from these qualities, as if they mark just a temporary phase in her life. Note by contrast how often in the film Ellie lapses back into her old ways: even after she and Peter have been together for a long while she is ready to gold-dig a man on the road (Danker, the road pirate as it turns out) for a meal, much to Peter's disapproval; and, quite unlike the story, at the very end when she is temporarily separated from Peter she all-too-easily jumps back on the "merry-go-round" of life with King Westley for a quick ride.

Generally, Elspeth is not the helpless, ungrateful, whining, virginal young woman that Ellie is throughout much of the film. In the story she misses the bus because of her foolish trip to the Windsor for a bath - throughout the story there is an almost obsessive concern with cleanliness that would be worth analyzing at some point - but this foolishness is compounded in the film by the fact that she first leaves her ticket behind (recovered by Peter) and then gets thoroughly drenched while waiting for the next bus. Perhaps this is simply Capra's way of initiating the process of humiliating trials that Ellie needs to endure as she enters into the "real world" of everyday experience, a world that she has been sheltered from in her father's house. (Male as well as female characters are educated in comically humiliating ways throughout Capra's films.) Or perhaps Ellie's thoroughgoing impracticality in this scene is part of what Raymond Carney sees as her charming ineptness - a characteristic of Peter as well.6 But the fact remains that at this point in the film Ellie is portrayed literally as someone who does not know enough to come in out of the rain and thus needs to be cared for and controlled by a strong man. In the story Elspeth is bossed around by Peter on only a few occasions, and their relationship is structured as not a battle but a balance of wills, a theme that I will say more about later.

The tone of their relationship in the story is set not only by the fact that Peter is thoughtful and sensitive (noticeably different from the picaresque dreamer played by Gable) but also by the fact that Elspeth is capable, self-assured, and somewhat "experienced" to begin with. Literary works and films of course have different conventions to work within and are subjected to different degrees of censorship: this may explain some of why "Night Bus" seems more mature and forthright about sexuality than It Happened One Night.1 At the same time, though, I think that at bottom the story and film reflect dramatically contrasting views about women and sexuality. There is, to be sure, a certain amount of good-natured bantering in the film that reflects a desire to be open and adult about acknowledging that from the beginning Ellie and Peter are in an unconventional, highly charged sexual situation. For example, Peter's first words to her are obviously suggestive: after she takes the seat that he has cleared for himself, he says "Excuse me lady - but that upon which you sit - is mine" (screenplay, p. 10). And though we now watch the film with the hindsight gained by passing through at least a few sexual revolutions, we should not underestimate the daring novelty of the scenes showing their nights together, nor the charm of Gable's striptease, which is, as Roland Barthes would interpret it, not so much a lewd performance as a revelation of innocence.8

But the openness about sexuality - such as it is - is mostly on Gable's part.9 It is worth noting how nervous, shy, and suspicious Ellie is, for example, in the first motel scene, feelings not particularly assuaged when Peter mockingly sings "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf. . . . She's afraid of the big bad wolf (screenplay, p. 20). Her absolute innocence, chastity, and naïveté are confirmed the following morning when she tells him, protesting a bit too much, "Would you believe it? This is the first time I've ever been alone with a man! . . . . It's a wonder I'm not panic stricken" (screenplay, p. 26). Capra's emphasis on Elite's inexperience and shyness is much in contrast with Adams's presentation of Elspeth as a woman much more confident of herself in sexual situations. The first night in the motel in the story is hardly the long, dramatic scene it is in the film: she examines Peter fully in one glance, feels very comfortable with him, and with only a minimum of bantering - interestingly, initated by her with a joke about a trumpet to blow down the walls of Jericho - they quickly fall asleep (p. 48). Later on there is further evidence that Elspeth is no shy young maiden but rather knowledgeable, mature, and unembarrassed by love: when the walls of Jericho, the blanket put up by Peter to separate their beds, blow down one night, she approves of their new-found closeness (p. 55); when Peter, in a strikingly erotic scene, awakens from a dream and kisses her as she leans over - all she wanted to tell him was that their car was being stolen - she maintains her poise (pp. 70-71); and at the end of the story, she pursues Peter, giving him a toy trumpet that symbolizes sexual consummation - a symbol that, interestingly enough, she has to explain to him (p. 90).

We would not guess from watching the film that Elspeth in the story is a practical, helpful, and imaginative woman, fully an equal partner in and contributor to a process of mutual education and support. In a story that, like the film, stresses the importance of conversation (see Cavell's interesting discussion of this theme [pp. 86-88]), Elspeth is often the instigator, ready to talk freely about her life (p. 53) and persistent enough to overcome Peter's shyness about this life and feelings. The ending especially, where Elspeth skillfully sets up a situation where he can be "desperate and reckless" (p. 89), that is to say uncharacteristically open about his deep love for her, confirms that a large part of the story revolves around the growth of the man, ably tutored by the woman.

Elspeth also more than holds her own when it comes to the day to day details of traveling on the road. Peter first takes charge of economic and domestic responsibilities, handling the money, securing shelter and food, and so on, but unlike the film, where this is taken to be the legitimate assertion of a man's power over a spoiled, helpless rich girl, in the story this provides an opportunity for Elspeth to show how cooperative and resourceful she is. Though it is clearly a new experience for her, she rather quickly and cheerfully joins in getting out the cooking kit and washing the greasy dishes. Later she demonstrates a keen practical sense when she reminds Peter - with an elbow to the ribs - that his good deed helping a man start his van's engine should not go unrewarded (pp. 57-58). Elspeth is quite as capable a provider as Peter, shown convincingly in a remarkable scene (not in the film) where she goes off on her own and barters successfully for some food (p. 60). Cavell pays a great deal of attention to images of food and hunger in It Happened One Night (cf. esp., pp. 91-96) and Peter's nurturant role; he does not, however, note that in the story Peter and Elspeth nurture one another.

It is particularly interesting to find that Adams not only pictures Elspeth as a "Canny Scawtswumman" (p. 60), but also shows that this is the basis of Peter's attraction to her. Only after she returns from her bargaining adventure, sign of her independent strength, does he admit that she is "darn bonny" (p. 60):

"Is this the first time you've noticed that?" she inquired impudently. "It hadn't struck in before," he confessed, (p. 60)

The basis of Peter's attraction to Elite in the film is much different: he responds most to her vulnerability and rather passive (though considerable) physical beauty. In one of the most famous scenes added to the film, Ellie shows that she possesses a certain amount of power but only as a sexual object: she hikes up her dress to stop a car for a ride, proving that her "limb" is stronger than his "thumb" but this is a dubious victory. For the most part her beauty and desirability are linked to her inactivity and defenselessness. Even a quick study of how Peter and the camera "gaze" at Ellie in the film is instructive. Early on, for example, he is charmed by her as she rests on him in the bus: "I hated to wake you up," he says. "You look kind of pretty asleep." And in several key moments spaced throughout the film, Capra's use of soft-focus shots of Ellie and highly diffused lighting perfectly conveys his re-creation of her as an immobile romantic idol. During the first night at the motel, for example, Ellie slowly begins to trust Peter more and more, and her screen image visibly softens: the last shot of the scene shows her lying very still in bed, with the dim light from the window creating a kind of aura around her head on the pillow and also glistening in her eyes. This dreamy vision of a beautiful woman is a central image in It Happened One Night, and I will have more to say about its recurrence later in my essay.

While there is evidence of Capra's radical transformation of Elspeth in nearly every scene of the film, an examination of several incidents in particular gives a good insight into what he added and what he sacrificed when he adapted the story. For example, in the story, Elspeth is bothered but not completely flustered by the repeated advances of Horace Shapley - who deserves the label "the pill of the century" much more than King Westley. Far from being hopelessly vulnerable, she is even "mildly curious" about Shapley (p. 51), willing to endure him for the sake of an adventure. When he gets too overbearing she expects Peter to come to the rescue, but when he doesn't she simply changes seats, in the process grinding her high heel into Shapley's shin (p. 52). Peter refuses to play the chivalrous hero - "I never could see any sense in fighting unless you have to," he says (p. 52) - so she is left to her own devices, and manages quite well.

In the film, though, this scene is clearly structured as part of a romance, featuring the rescue of a helpless damsel in distress by a grudging hero, a pattern repeated several times in the film. Acting with the kind of bravado that he will use again in a later scene with Shapley (when he finally scares him away by pretending to be a ganster), Peter rescues Ellie by claiming her as his wife, and in the scenes that follow he continues to play the role of the domineering husband. Karyn Kay suggests that in general the battles between men and women in the screwball comedies "end up as homiletics about the need for wives to obey husbands," and in this respect It Happened One Night is indeed conservative and traditional.10

Even scenes that apparently show Ellie's wit and vivacity to their best advantage contain disturbing undertones of helplessness. For example, after the first night in the motel, detectives on the lookout for the missing heiress knock on the door, and Peter and Ellie put on a charade that not only fools their pursuers but also functions as a kind of psychodrama, picturing and to a certain extent working out some of their difficulties relating to one another." Peter, for example, gives vent to his anger at her family and her flirtation with King Westley, loosely disguised as the "big Swede" he says made a pass at her at the Elk's dance (screenplay, p. 26). This scene also shows her how protective he can be, an effective stand-in and replacement for her father even as he shields her from the detectives sent by her father. And here Ellie is finally able to yell back at Peter, cry because of his insulting behavior (not all of which is a put-on), and in general "change places with a plumber's daughter" as she had wished just before the detectives entered (screenplay, p. 25). Together they very convincingly act the part of, as one bystander notes ironically, a "perfectly nice married couple" (screenplay, p. 27), composed of a hysterical woman and a loud, threatening man.

Despite the remarkable exuberance here and Peter's sincere appreciation of Ellie's skill, two aspects of the scene are troubling. First, recall how frantic she is at the mere hint of trouble, literally ready to jump out the window to avoid the detectives. Second, note that as brilliant as Ellie is in this improvisation, she is directed by Peter. I2 In the equivalent scene in the story, when she and Peter are stopped by a policeman after hitching a ride with a stranger, it is Ellie who easily follows the driver's lead and fabricates the story that saves the day. Rather than being the director, Peter is quiet and happy to be in the hands of such a capable woman: at this point, Adams notes, "Peter's admiration became almost more than he could bear" (p. 67).

One final scene gives a particularly clear view of how differently Adams and Capra develop their main women characters. Perhaps the most dramatic episode in the story comes when Ellie and Peter cross a stream that is swollen by heavy rainfall. This is a dangerous adventure, echoing a kind of archetypal perilous journey common in American literature - Huckleberry Finn comes obviously to mind - and Ellie proves to be a "stout fella" (p. 63) as she both steers and bails out the leaky boat. Her one moment of fear, as she is suddenly caught in "a mass of leafy branches" that grab her like "a hundred tentacles" (p. 64) is certainly no sign of basic weakness. Peter in fact shares this fear, and even when he has to come to her aid she never seems less than a worthy "shipmate" (p. 64). The "horror" of this adventure further solidifies their relationship, and indicates that the male-female bond developed through the course of the story will be deep and lasting, based on mutual respect and shared experiences of joy and fear. Adams thus not only avoids "a reiteration of [the] manabove-woman world order," which Karyn Kay suggests is inevitably insisted on even in the apparently unconventional screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s,'3 but also avoids a simple and perhaps not entirely liberating inversion of typical masculinedominant and feminine-submissive roles. I4 Much to Adams's credit, Peter and Elspeth do not exchange stereotyped roles: instead, they each possess active and passive qualities, strengths and weaknesses encompassed and allowed by their relationship with one another.15

Capra's version of this episode avoids Adams's somewhat overstated melodrama, but the light comedy and romance he substitutes are by no means an improvement. Much in contrast with the story, the turbulent stream becomes only a minor inconvenience, not dangerous, only wet; the water is sparkling, not swirling, and this indicates that the brief journey is not a perilous adventure but a prelude to romantic enchantment. The woman becomes not a partner but a child to be carried and spanked, and a coquette whose fear is foolish, not heroic. The climax of this episode, Claudette Colbert lying on her back in the hay, quiet, almost glowing in a moon-lit, soft-focus shot, is the second of Capra's carefully constructed visions of a man's idealized love object, comparable to the earlier night-time shot in the motel room as she is falling asleep. Peter nearly gives in and kisses her, but resists his desire and attempts to break the mood by "wondering what makes dames like you so dizzy" (screenplay, p. 37).

His resistance cannot last long, though, and breaks down further during the next night they spend together, the last of the major scenes in which Capra presents Ellie as invitingly out-of-focus. As they prepare for what they may be their final night together, each is remarkably honest and open. Peter in particular talks at length about his dream of escaping to an island with a woman to share "nights when you and the moon and the water all become one, and you feel that you're part of something big and marvelous" (screenplay, p. 42). At that moment, Ellie comes around the walls of Jericho to his side of the room, and something very interesting happens: a normal shot of her from Peter's point of view is suddenly followed by an almost identical shot but this time is soft focus. The effect is subtle but very effective, and we don't need the full arsensal of Lacanian analysis to realize that here Peter and perhaps the spectators of the film become integrated into the Imaginary: in everyday terms, perhaps the terms Capra took for granted, Peter is blissfully happy as Ellie steps into his dream. I6 I do not want to deny that the presentation of Ellie as a magically entrancing idealized woman is a powerful and perfectly evocative image for Capra's purposes. But we should note that this is not the Elspeth Andrews of Adams's "Night Bus," who is admirable and attractive for quite different reasons, nor is it an image of woman that modern viewers should be entirely happy with.

*****

In an essay defending filmmakers who rely on but inevitably popularize and water down literary works in their films, André Bazin warns that "We should not throw stones at the image-makers who simplify in adapting."17 It is certainly not my intention to throw stones at Capra, nor to deny the comic energy, wit, and charm of It Happened One Night that should be obvious even when we screen it today, more than fifty years later. Nor am I attempting to conclude that the film is by any means simple or shallow. Carney's impressive study effectively rebuts such an approach: he places Capra in a broad tradition of American visionaries and romantics, and persuasively argues that It Happened One Night, like Capra's other films in general, is a "troubled meditation" on "the great American project of fashioning a self and finding a place for it in the world that can live up to the claims that the imagination places upon it" (p. 39). But such an emphasis on self-fashioning in the films should also return us, at least momentarily, to the fashioning o/the films, to the process, in Carney's words, "of making visionary films out of [the] eminently unvisionary plays and stories" (p. 78) that were typically Capra's raw material. A close comparison of the film and the story on which it was based suggests that somewhere near the center of the construction of It Happened One Night is a process, conscious or not, that transforms a remarkably self-reliant woman into at best an object of desire and at worst a "brat" - a constantly repeated epithet in the film that, interestingly, is used only once in the story, by Elspeth herself in a moment of self-reflection (p. 78). It may be somewhat of an overstatement to suggest that Capra presents his heroine as "a spoiled brat so that he will not have to deal with her as a real woman."18 But praise of the philosophical profundity, comic genius, and enduring entertainment value of It Happened One Night cannot afford to overlook that the fashioning of its heroine involved the sacrifice of so many admirable qualités - practical experience, improvisatory skill, independent strength, self-knowledge, and sexual maturity among others - possessed by the fictional character she was based on.