Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

The world the movie shows us is a world waiting to be transformed. It’s a peculiarly American landscape: what it shows us isn’t exactly what it means — or values. Like the heart-stirring, oddly affecting plainness of certain midwestern Main Streets — broad, flat, unvarying — the drabness of “It Happened One Night” hides a kind of excitement: a deep belief in high spirits, in the ability of a joke or a song, a shared mood of elation or a witty inspiration, to transform and transfigure an unpromising environment. This landscape becomes something to triumph over — and its meanness becomes a measure of the triumph.

— James Harvey

Related

• Harvey’s “Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges” is one of the great books ever devoted to a single movie genre.
• Blowhard, Esq. posted a still from “It Happened One Night” a few days back.