Released just as the Hays Office was beginning to enforce the Production Code censoring ‘immoral’ movies, Frank Capra’s impish, daring comedy crackles with erotic tension. It Happened One Night is the first of only three films (along with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Silence of the Lambs) to win all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, cementing Capra’s reputation as a director as well as those of Columbia Pictures and his two stars.

Claudette Colbert stars as Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who elopes with a known fortune hunter to spite her father. Sequestered in Miami and under pressure to have her marriage annulled, Ellie runs off to reunite with her husband in New York. On a Greyhound bus, she meets a recently-fired news reporter Peter Warne — played by Clark Gable with gruff charm — who agrees to help her on her journey for an exclusive scoop of her story.