Next up on the AFI list is this Frank Capra romantic comedy. Claudette Colbert is an heiress running from her father on a road trip to join her quasi-husband; Clark Gable is the rakish newspaper reporter who helps her out along the way. They seem to hate each other, but is it possible that they just might fall in love?

Of course not! A down-on-his-luck newspaper man could never be attractive to a woman who’s lived a life of luxury; and this cynical workingman could never put up with an entitled rich girl. And besides, she’s already going to get married to this asshole pilot guy — why, she’d practically have to leave him at the altar at the very last minute, especially if a series of misunderstandings prevented her from realizing her true feelings until that point!

Everything about this movie is painfully familiar to the point of cliche, but: it’s 1934, so it’s possible that the cliches weren’t yet fully formed. Certainly the reception this movie got — it won the Academy Awards for best picture, director, screenplay, actor, and actress — seems to indicate that it was seen as a lot more impressive to the people of its time than it seems to a modern eye.

So I guess that’s a relevant question: Is this the first romantic comedy of this proto-screwball type? Googling around suggests: not quite. There seem to be a few earlier screwball comedies that precede it (including one from Capra himself), but it doesn’t seem like there were all that many; there are a lot of less-thorough articles that list this as the first one. Presumably it was the first one to get the ingredients just right and to be successful, the Command & Conquer to those other movies’ Herzog Zwei and Dune II.

So okay, I’ll give it some props for historical importance, and for being, in many ways, a fully-formed example of its genre: It’s genuinely remarkable how few changes it would take to make this a modern movie, ninety years later. (Mostly tbh some contrivance to motivate her running away, despite the happy reality that women in 2024 (unlike, apparently, in 1934) are actual legal persons who are able to make their own decisions rather than having their father or husband decide things on their behalf.)

But if this movie was historically important, that’s really the only reason to include it on the AFI list, because it’s otherwise nothing special. The more-developed screwball comedies that came a few years later (like Bringing up Baby or The Philadelphia Story, both also on the AFI list) are fun movies that retain their appeal in modernity, with charismatic leads and fast-paced banter. This really isn’t. It’s amiable enough, but nothing more.

All that said, there’s one huge historical mystery that I am now dying of curiosity about. In this movie, there’s a scene on a bus where a band plays “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and everyone sings along. It’s a full musical number that includes three entire verses. I of course instantly googled to see if the song had been written for this movie or had been otherwise recently composed.

But no. The song dates back to 1867, and was recorded in 1928. However in 1932 a comedian re-recorded it, and it slow-rolled into being a hit. In 1934, there was a short story released that was inspired by it, and it also appeared that year in this movie, a Little Rascals short, a Popeye cartoon, and two other movies. The following year, there’s a movie entitled Man on the Flying Trapeze. The song appears in one more movie in 1936, and then goes fallow until the ’50s. Imagine living in a world where that’s the big, inescapable breakout pop hit.