ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that It Happened One Night, Frank Capra’s 1934 romantic comedy, delivers parallel criticisms of class and gender hierarchy, but articulated in the more broadly democratic context of American society. Wealth and masculinist assumptions of superiority based on expertise are represented as forms of pride inimical to the democratic values the film endorses. It Happened One Night tells the story of Ellie Andrews, the pampered, strong-willed daughter of a Wall Street tycoon. For academic film theory, It Happened One Night has served as an example of how Hollywood narratives misrepresent and legitimize relationships of social domination. It Happened One Night makes the irony of Peter’s reproach to Ellie, that she lacks humility, abundantly clear, although this aspect of the film is absent from Cavell’s account of it. In contemporary terms, the personal has become the political in the specific sense that the triumph of their love symbolizes the possibility of a democratic culture.
