Word: westley
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Movies don't change. Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is still a rich, spoiled heiress with a daddy problem who thinks she wants to marry a phony named King Westley, an "aviator" who arrives for their wedding by landing on Daddy's sumptuous lawn in an autogyro. Peter Warne (Clark Gable), an unemployed newspaperman and wisecracking paragon, rescues Ellie from the phonies at the last moment and bears her away to the true America, for a honeymoon in a roadside motor camp in Michigan...
...Happened One Night dances charmingly along the fence between lark and allegory. It is, among other things, a dissertation on what it means to be an American phony. King Westley--"the pill of the century," as Gable says, a cafe society parasite with the face of a small reptile--wants to marry Ellie for her money and in the end accepts a bribe of $100,000 to go away. King's narcissistic autogyro is a sort of 1930s version of the Osprey, or of those personal motor-scooters-of-the-air that the writer James Fallows envisioned...
...often in Hollywood's version of the '30s, the rich are sleek, fat, boozy, faintly ridiculous. The media (newspapers and their editors, in this case) make idiots of themselves in a montage of pinwheeling banner headlines: LOVE TRIUMPHANT! screams the "New York Mail" over the phony "yarn" of Westley and Ellie being madly in love...
...Capra had an eye for basic American themes that keep reformulating themselves from one generation to another. You watch It Happened One Night with a sense that it's a contemporary story. Play a game: set down the Peter Warne character and the King Westley character as American archetypes and relocate them in the present. Which of them, would you judge, emerges triumphant...
...Until Sept. 11, I would have said the sleek fraud King Westley (with his autogyro and chiseled money and bogus media) would get the girl and take over America. Now I am not so sure. We shall see. The movie's not over...