The Sexy Lunacy of It Happened One Night

My second post for the ongoing romantic films countdown at Wonders in the Dark is up now. At number 32, it’s Frank Capra’s seminal sexy screwball classic, It Happened One Night (1934). Night has been cited as one of the founding pictures of the screwball genre, and indeed, many of the elements that would come to define…

“That’s not a family; it’s a disease”: Broadway Bill (1934)

In 1934, director Frank Capra released the seminal classic It Happened One Night, a picture that helped define the relatively new genre of screwball comedy. On the heels of that film’s monumental success, Capra followed up with another comedy, Broadway Bill. But while Night became a perennial favorite, Bill virtually disappeared for decades after its release; according to the TCMdb entry on…

“I guess rich people are just poor people with money.”

Alfred Borden (Walter Connolly) is having a bad day. His business is in trouble; his wife, Martha (Verree Teasdale), is cheating on him with another man; his son, Tim (Tim Holt), would rather play polo than work; and his daughter, Katherine (Kathryn Adams), is in love with Mike (James Ellison), the family’s disdainful, Communist-sympathizing chauffeur.…