Back in the day, way, way back in the day, in 1960, I first saw It Happened One Night, at age 15 on a 17-inch TV. When the walls of Jericho finally fell, I wondered to myself “Well, since they know how to make good movies, why aren’t they all like this?”
Forty-nine years later, I’m still wondering. Pencil moustaches and plucked eyebrows never looked so good as when Clark and Claudette made their trek from Miami to New York, a journey almost as epic as Huck and Jim’s down the Mississippi, and a lot more stylish. If this be Capra-corn, make mine a double and hold the Noel Coward.
Afterwords
If you don’t get the headline, see the damn picture.
— Alan Vanneman
Alan Vanneman is a writer living in Washington, DC. He is the author of two dead-tree novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, both published by Penzler Press. Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara is available as an audiobook from Blackstone/Downpour. He is also the author of three new Nero Wolfe novellas recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective, a FREE ebook, and Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, a collection of two short stories and a novella, available both as an ebook and print on demand. All of his fiction can be accessed here at his blog Literature R Us. Portions of his article "Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone," which originally appeared online in Bright Lights, have been included in a textbook anthology by Allison Smith, Trixie Smith, and Stacia Watkins.
