Academy Awards: Best Picture
Academy Awards: Clark Gable – Best Actor
Academy Awards: Claudette Colbert – Best Actress
Academy Awards: Frank Capra – Best Director
Academy Awards: Robert Riskin – Best Writing, Adaptation
Photoplay Awards: Best Pictures of the Month (April)
Photoplay Awards: Clark Gable – Best Performances of the Month (April)
Photoplay Awards: Claudette Colbert – Best Performances of the Month (April)

No Soundtrack Available

Ellie: Aren’t you going to give me a little credit?
Peter: What for?
Ellie: I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.
Peter: Why didn’t you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars.
Ellie: Well, I’ll remember that when we need forty cars.

Ellie: Have you ever been in love, Peter?
Peter: Me?
Ellie: Yes. Haven’t you ever thought about it at all? It seems to me you, you could make some girl wonderfully happy.
Peter: Sure I’ve thought about it. Who hasn’t? If I could ever meet the right sort of girl. Aw, where you gonna find her? Somebody that’s real. Somebody that’s alive. They don’t come that way anymore. Have I ever thought about it? I’ve even been sucker enough to make plans. You know, I saw an island in the Pacific once. I’ve never been able to forget it. That’s where I’d like to take her. She’d have to be the sort of a girl who’d… well, who’d jump in the surf with me and love it as much as I did. You know, nights when you and the moon and the water all become one. You feel you’re part of something big and marvelous. That’s the only place to live… where the stars are so close over your head you feel you could reach up and stir them around. Certainly, I’ve been thinking about it. Boy, if I could ever find a girl who was hungry for those things…

Ellie: Outside of the fact that you don’t like him you haven’t got a thing against King.
Alexander: He’s a fake, Ellie.
Ellie: He’s one of the best flyers in the country.
Alexander: He’s no good and you know it. You married him only because I told you not to.
Ellie: You’ve been telling me what not to do ever since I can remember.
Alexander: That’s because you’ve always been a stubborn idiot,
Ellie: I come from a long line of stubborn idiots!

Peter: Say, where’d you learn to dunk? In finishing school?
Ellie: Aw, now don’t you start telling me I shouldn’t dunk.
Peter: Of course you shouldn’t – you don’t know how to do it. Dunking’s an art. Don’t let it soak so long. A dip and
[he stuffs the donut in his mouth]
Peter: plop, in your mouth. You let it hang there too long, it’ll get soft and fall off. It’s all a matter of timing. Aw, I oughta write a book about it.
Ellie: [laughs] Thanks, professor.
Peter: Just goes to show you – twenty millions, and you don’t know how to dunk.
Ellie: Oh, I’d change places with a plumber’s daughter any day.

Ellie: You think I’m a fool and a spoiled brat. Well, perhaps I am, although I don’t see how I can be. People who are spoiled are accustomed to having their own way. I never have. On the contrary. I’ve always been told what to do, and how to do it, and when, and with whom. Would you believe it? This is the first time I’ve ever been alone with a man!
Peter: Yeah?
Ellie: It’s a wonder I’m not panic-stricken.
Peter: You’re doing alright.
Ellie: Thanks. Nurses, governesses, chaperones, even bodyguards. Oh, it’s been a lot of fun.

Peter: I never did like the idea of sitting on newspapers. I did it once, and all the headlines came off on my white pants. On the level! It actually happened. Nobody bought a paper that day. They just followed me around over town and read the news on the seat of my pants.

Peter: I want to see what love looks like when it’s triumphant. I haven’t had a good laugh in a week.

Alexander: Oh, er, do you mind if I ask you a question, frankly? Do you love my daughter?
Peter: Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined.
Alexander: Now that’s an evasion!
Peter: She picked herself a perfect running mate – King Westley – the pill of the century! What she needs is a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not. If you had half the brains you’re supposed to have, you’d done it yourself, long ago.
Alexander: Do you love her?
Peter: A normal human being couldn’t live under the same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!
Alexander: I asked you a simple question! Do you love her?
Peter: Yes! But don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself!

• It Happened One Night became the first film to win the Big Five: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. This feat would later be duplicated by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) in 1992.
• When director Frank Capra asked Claudette Colbert to expose her leg for the hitchhiking scene, she initially refused. Later, after having seen the leg of her body double, she changed her mind, insisting, “That is not my leg!”
• Claudette Colbert complained nearly every day during the making of the film. On the last day of shooting, she told a friend, “I just finished making the worst picture I’ve ever made”.
• Although Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra had a slightly cantankerous relationship during the making of the film, she nevertheless appreciated his efforts and thanked him at the Academy Awards when she won the Oscar for Best Actress.
• According to Frank Capra in an interview with Richard Schickel for “The Men Who Made the Movies”, “We made the picture really quickly – four weeks. We stumbled through it, we laughed our way through it. And this goes to show you how much luck and timing and being in the right place at the right time mean in show business; how sometimes no preparation at all is better than all the preparation in the world, and sometimes you need great preparation, but you can never out-guess this thing called creativity. It happens in the strangest places and under the strangest of circumstances. I didn’t care much for the picture. It turned out to be ‘It Happened One Night’.”
• In 1996, Steven Spielberg anonymously purchased Clark Gable’s Oscar to protect it from further commercial exploitation and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, commenting that he could think of “no better sanctuary for Gable’s only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy”.
• Claudette Colbert was so convinced that she would lose the Oscar competition in 1935 to write-in nominee Bette Davis that she decided not to attend the awards ceremony. When she won that year, contrary to her belief, she was summoned from the train station to pick up her Oscar.
• It Happened One Night (1934), along with Gigi (1958), The Last Emperor (1987), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and CODA (2021) holds the record for winning all the awards in every single major category in which it was nominated for at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• It Happened One Night (1934) became the very first romantic comedy to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. This feat would later be duplicated by You Can’t Take It with You (1938) (another Frank Capra film), The Apartment (1960), Annie Hall (1977), Terms of Endearment (1983), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and The Artist (2011).
• Friz Freleng, the creator and animator of Bugs Bunny, noted that It Happened One Night was one of his favorite films. Several key mannerisms for the character were taken from Clark Gable’s performance as Peter Warne. Peter casually chomps on carrots and is called “Doc” by another character named Oscar. Peter also created a fictional man named “Bugs Dooley” in order to intimidate Oscar.