When the list of nominees for the Best Actress for 1934 was announced there was an uproar. Indignant articles, telegrams, letters and phone calls attacked the Academy’s oversight for not including Bette Davis, whose performance in “Of Human Bondage” was considered my many to have been the best of the year.
Such was the furore that the Academy proposed that voters on the final ballot would be allowed to add any name they please to the official list of nominees, Norma Shearer “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” Grace Moore of “One Night of Love” and Claudette Colbert's “It Happened One Night”…
Colbert was so certain that she didn’t have a hope of winning that she was boarding a train for New York when Academy officials found her and told her that she had won.
The Best Actress award was not the only surprise, when Clark Gable scraped in ahead of William Powell who was considered favourite to win the Best Actor Oscar for his role in “The Thin Man”
“It Happened One Night” also carried off the Best Picture Award. So, no only did it win the highest accolade for a film, but it was the first in which both male and female leads won the top acting awards.
It also gained an Oscar fro director frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin a grand slam unequalled by any picture until “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 41 years later.
Synopsis
In the first scene, rich, spoiled Ellie (Colbert) dives off the palatial yacht of her father (Walter Connolly) where she has been held against her will because he objects to her marriage to a play boy aviator. King Westley (Jameson Thomas). She swims ashore and begins her freewheeling trip from Miami to New York.
Along the way she meets up with newspaperman, Peter (Gable) who has recognised her from her picture in the paper. Peter offers to help Ellie reach her destination undetected in return for a day-to-day account of the ‘mad flight to happiness.”
There is a rainstorm and a washed-out bridge cases Peter and Ellie to leave the bus and spend the night in a nearby hotel where Pere register them into a single cabin because they don’t have enough money for separate rooms
Being the road teaches Ellie more about the real world and this has her falling in love with self-reliant, Peter. Her father agrees with her new choice and hastly annuls the unconsummated previous marriage to make way for true love.
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