DVD Review: Winning Capra classic gets Criterion treatment

Thanks to the popularity of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” few viewers remember that filmmaker Frank Capra arose from what was then a “minor” studio, Columbia Pictures, taking Columbia along with him. The central component of what we now refer to as Sony Pictures, Columbia was a Poverty Row outfit that had the good luck (or good taste) to hire Capra and spotlight his work. The transition stretched out almost a decade, but the pivotal film was “It Happened One Night,” which won all five of the biggest Oscars — Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress — at a time when the studio had barely been nominated before. (And those few nominations were for a Capra film.)

This romantic comedy, made at the bottom of the Great Depression and just on the cusp of the enforcement of the Production Code, stars Clark Gable as a down-on-his luck reporter, who latches on to runaway heiress Claudette Colbert. Every aspect has been imitated endlessly since, but the original still works.

Criterion’s new edition has a good transfer of a reasonably good print: the most popular films from the era often got the most battered because of the constant need for new prints. The extras are almost all worthwhile: Ron Howard hosts “Frank Capra’s American Dream,” a two-hour TV documentary from 1997; from 1982 comes an hourlong tribute to Capra for winning AFI’s Life Achievement Award; there is a 10-minute 1999 interview about the film with Frank Capra Jr.; and a recent 40-minute discussion between critics Molly Haskell and Philip Lopate. The neatest of the bunch is Capra’s first shot at filmmaking, “Fultah Fisher’s Boarding House,” made in 1921, essentially a 10-minute illustration of the Kipling poem of the same name.

It Happened One Night (Criterion, Blu-ray, $39.95; DVD, two discs, $29.95

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).