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Creating timeless comedies is a truly remarkable accomplishment for filmmakers. It’s no secret that all movie genres have the potential to age poorly, but comedy, especially, has an expiration date due to its contextual and individualistic nature. What’s funny today might not make sense in the future, and what tickles some people may leave others cold.

When it comes to picking the best comedy movies of all time, durability must be taken into account. How well does this film hold up now? Will it still be hilarious years from now?

After intense research, we’ve found the ten highest-rated comedy films that represent laugh-out-loud hilarity and will stand the test of time. We can’t guarantee these will elicit uproarious laughter from everyone – then again, if they don’t…maybe you should take a step back and reassess your comedic sensibilities – or at least vote for your favorite comedy on IMDb.

Culver City, Calif. – Continuing the fan-favorite and award-winning series, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is proud to debut six more acclaimed and iconic films from its library on 4K Ultra HD disc for the first time ever, exclusively within the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 3, available October 25. This must-own set includes films that have resonated and endured, with stars and stories that have reverberated through cinema history: It Happened One Night, From Here To Eternity, To Sir, With Love, The Last Picture Show, Annie and As Good As It Gets. Each film is presented in 4K resolution with Dolby Vision High Dynamic Range, and four of the films have all-new Dolby Atmos mixes.

The six films in the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Volume 3 are only available on 4K Ultra HD disc within this special limited edition collector’s set. Included with the collection is a gorgeous hardbound 80-page book,...

Join Cinema St. Louis for their free online movie club! Since we can’t watch a film together on the big screen, Cinema St. Louis invites you to come together to share our love of cinema from the comfort of your own home. Every other week Cinema St. Louis will select a film available on a streaming service and host the discussion on Facebook.

Cinema St. Louis will be hosting an Online Screening of It Happened One Night this Monday (May 19th) at 7:30pm(Ct). Diane Carson, Ph.D., professor emerita, and reviewer of films for more than 25 years, covering Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Palm Springs, and Sundance festivals, will be talking about the film on Facebook Live. For more details go to the Facebook invite Here

It Happened One Night concerns an heiress, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) who runs away from her father to join her new husband, society...

Whaddaya know, this new disc of the Carole Lombard / Fredric March comedy hit looks great, besting by far all previous videos and prints I’ve seen of the early (1937) Technicolor production. Hazel Flagg’s Madcap Manhattan Weekend now pops with brilliant hues. And a little digging tells us that Ben Hecht’s morbid premise is based on a real-life scandalous workplace tragedy called ‘The Living Dead Women.’

Nothing Sacred

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1937 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 74 min. / Street Date November 13, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Charles Winninger, Walter Connolly, Sig Ruman, Troy Brown, Max ‘Slapsie Maxie’ Rosenbloom, Margaret Hamilton, Olin Howland.

Cinematography: W. Howard Greene

Original Music: Oscar Levant

Written by Ben Hecht suggested by a story by James H. Street

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by William A. Wellman

Here’s something we didn’t expect to see. When I reviewed an older Kino disc of this title,...

The retrospective Frank Capra, The American Dreamer is showing April 10 - May 31, 2017 in the United Kingdom.Frank CapraFrank Capra has fallen badly out of fashion in recent decades. While still well-known for the extraordinary Depression-era purple patch that produced It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the critics have rarely been kind. His work is routinely derided as “Capra-corn” for its perceived sentimentality and “fairy tale” idealism while the man himself is written off in favour of contemporaries Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch.Elliot Stein, writing in Sight & Sound in 1972, attacked Capra’s “fantasies of good will, which at no point conflict with middle-class American status quo values”, arguing that his “shrewdly commercial manipulative tracts” consist of little more than “philistine-populist notions and greeting-card sentiments”. Pauline Kael found him “softheaded,” Derek Malcolm a huckster hawking “cosily absurd fables.” To an extent,...

Stars: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Jameson Thomas, Alan Hale, Arthur Hoyt, Blanche Friderici | Screenplay by Robert Riskin | Directed by Frank Capra

Spoiled but spirited socialite Ellie (Claudette Colbert) flees her privileged life commandeered by her overbearing father and ends up sharing a bus ride across America with cynical, hard-drinking newspaperman Peter (Clark Gable). If you think you know how that story ends you’re probably right, but audiences in 1934 wouldn’t have seen the inevitable romantic and comedic scenes coming; we may be used to the road-trip, odd-couple romance by now (it’s practically a subgenre all by itself), but It Happened One Night was the first of its kind.

Following a row aboard her father’s boat, Ellie dives into the harbour and enlists the help of an older woman so that she can buy a Greyhound bus ticket cross-country to Miami. The motivation behind...

Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...

Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...

Rex Ingram in 'The Thief of Bagdad' 1940 with tiny Sabu. Actor Rex Ingram movies on TCM: Early black film performer in 'Cabin in the Sky,' 'Anna Lucasta' It's somewhat unusual for two well-known film celebrities, whether past or present, to share the same name.* One such rarity is – or rather, are – the two movie people known as Rex Ingram;† one an Irish-born white director, the other an Illinois-born black actor. Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” continues today, Aug. 11, '15, with a day dedicated to the latter. Right now, TCM is showing Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical adaptation of the Faust tale that is notable as the first full-fledged feature film directed by another Illinois-born movie person, Vincente Minnelli. Also worth mentioning, the movie marked Lena Horne's first important appearance in a mainstream motion picture.§ A financial disappointment on the...

Olivia de Havilland picture U.S. labor history-making 'Gone with the Wind' star and two-time Best Actress winner Olivia de Havilland turns 99 (This Olivia de Havilland article is currently being revised and expanded.) Two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Olivia de Havilland, the only surviving major Gone with the Wind cast member and oldest surviving Oscar winner, is turning 99 years old today, July 1.[1] Also known for her widely publicized feud with sister Joan Fontaine and for her eight movies with Errol Flynn, de Havilland should be remembered as well for having made Hollywood labor history. This particular history has nothing to do with de Havilland's films, her two Oscars, Gone with the Wind, Joan Fontaine, or Errol Flynn. Instead, history was made as a result of a legal fight: after winning a lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the mid-'40s, Olivia de Havilland put an end to treacherous...

The above exchange from Frank Capra's romantic gem It Happened One Night doesn't necessarily give you any insight into the plot. Without the knowledge of what came before, or the visual of Claudet Colbert as spoiled sophisticate Ellie Andrews warily climbing into the car with the man she's traveled alongside from Florida to New York City, the joke probably doesn't pack much of an umph. But once you've seen this 1935 Best Picture winner as many times as I have, you never know which lines will jump out and make you laugh more than you previously did in the past. It Happened One Night is one of those wonderful Hollywood accidents. Neither Colbert nor her co-star, Clark Gable, were the first choices for the lead roles. In fact, it wasn't until Colbert won for Best Actress that she publicly thanked Capra for making the film (despite not even attending the Oscars,...

Though Frank Capra is known for his humanist films that are often about great men who fight for social justice, one of his best works is (arguably) the first screwball comedy that backgrounds class issues for a rollicking adventure about a dizzy heiress and a hard-boiled reporter. That film is It Happened One Night, and it’s rightfully received a place in the Criterion Collection. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert star, and my review of the film on Blu-ray follows after the jump. The film opens with Colbert’s Ellie Andrews having just married King Wesley, but her father (Walter Connolly) disapproves of the man and the marriage, so he tries to take her to get it annulled. She rejects this and literally jumps off his boat in Florida. She decides to take a bus to New York to meet her new husband, and hopes to dodge the men her...

It Happened One Night

Directed by Frank Capra

Written by Robert Riskin

USA, 1934

When Frank Capra came upon the 1933 Samuel Hopkins Adams story “Night Bus,” he thought it would make a great film. He bought the property and took it to screenwriter Robert Riskin, with whom he had worked a few years prior on Platinum Blonde (1931). The script was set to be Capra’s next feature for Columbia, then a lower-rung studio where he was their preeminent director. The problem? Nobody wanted to make the film. Several top actors and actresses of the day turned down the picture, Robert Montgomery, Carole Lombard, and Myrna Loy among them. Clark Gable, not yet the caliber of star he would become, eventually accepted the male lead, and Claudette Colbert eventually (and reluctantly) took the female lead … under the condition that her $25,000 salary would be doubled, which it was. The film’s entire budget...

Winner of five Oscars, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night remains an outstanding entertainment, and a touchstone of Hollywood’s most enduring cinematic genre: the Romantic Comedy. Filled with naughty, cloying sexuality and a lovable slate of archetypal characters, the film encapsulated the aspirations and desperations of 1930s America, even while evoking giggles of delight from a battered audience facing a dark and uncertain future. While the Great Depression is never addressed directly, the pressures of those days infuse every aspect of It Happened One Night, from its depiction of pampered, frivolous one per-centers to its array of dodgy conmen, hapless working stiffs and penniless drifters. The fact that love continued to find a way through the world’s political and economic maelstroms was a comforting notion in 1934; a notion perfectly suited to Capra’s trademark optimistic populism.

The film’s stagebound, talky exposition scene may feel awkward at first,...

Claudette Colbert movies on Turner Classic Movies: From ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’ to TCM premiere ‘Skylark’ (photo: Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier in ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’) Claudette Colbert, the studio era’s perky, independent-minded — and French-born — "all-American" girlfriend (and later all-American wife and mother), is Turner Classic Movies’ star of the day today, August 18, 2014, as TCM continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" film series. Colbert, a surprise Best Actress Academy Award winner for Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, was one Paramount’s biggest box office draws for more than decade and Hollywood’s top-paid female star of 1938, with reported earnings of $426,944 — or about $7.21 million in 2014 dollars. (See also: TCM’s Claudette Colbert day in 2011.) Right now, TCM is showing Ernst Lubitsch’s light (but ultimately bittersweet) romantic comedy-musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a Best Picture Academy Award nominee starring Maurice Chevalier as a French-accented Central European lieutenant in...

In music there are only 12 notes, so it's no wonder so many songs sound the same. But what about someone's voice? The way someone speaks is not bound by any kind of scale or music theory, rather it's the sum a person’s upbringing, their physicality, and their personality. So why do so many cartoon characters sound so eerily familiar? In this list we highlight 10 cartoon characters whose voices (and often their likenesses) are based on other actors. We also mention 5 other cartoon voices that are impressions in the bonus sections of related entries. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these actors have been thoroughly praised by some of the best.

Homer Simpson (The Simpsons) - Walter Matthau

Over the past 3 decades The Simpsons has been on the air, America’s favorite family has gone through many changes. Aside from the quality of the animation, the most noticeable...

“Well you’ve shown me an excellent example of the hiking part. When does the hitching come in?”

Frank Capra’s 1934 film It Happened One Night was the first film to win the Oscar “grand slam” (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Screenplay) and is considered a pioneer of the screwball comedy genre. Lucky St. Louisans will have the chance to see it on the big screen when it plays next Saturday, February 8th at The Hi-Pointe Theater at 10:30am as part of their Classic Film Series.

It Happened One Night concerns an heiress, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) who runs away from her father to join her new husband, society aviator King Westley (Jameson Thomas). On the bus, she meets a reporter named Peter Warne (Clark Gable) who is down on his luck. The strike a bargain: Peter can have an exclusive on Ellie’s story...

The holy grail of customer satisfaction as well as an artistic taboo, the happy ending can be played out in many ways. Which films would you add to this list?

This week Clip joint is from John Carvill, who previously wrote on subjects as varied as taking the train and 'meet cutes'. If you've got an idea for a future clip joint, email adam.boult@guardian.co.uk.

During a key scene in The Player, Robert Altman's shrewdly meta-fictional Hollywood movie about how Hollywood makes movies, studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) languidly enumerates to June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), the elements a script needs if it is to become one of the dozen or so per year that Griffin's studio can green light for production: "Suspense, laughter, violence … hope, heart … nudity, sex … happy endings." Griffin pauses, then concludes: "Mainly happy endings."

Happy endings, being both a holy grail of...

Carole Lombard on TCM: My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, The Racketeer Mitchell Leisen's Hands Across the Table (1935) would have been more enjoyable had Carole Lombard ended up with Ralph Bellamy instead of Fred MacMurray. In fact, MacMurray's obnoxious Average Joe portrayal — who comes across as the Average Jerk instead — all but destroys the film. His character should have gone to, once again, Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Edward G. Robinson, Bela Lugosi, Ginger Rogers, May Robson, or just about anyone else in Hollywood at that time. I haven't watched Vigil in the Night (1940), a melodrama about two sisters/nurses that isn't considered one of George Stevens' best. The cast, however, is good: in addition to Lombard, there are Brian Aherne and Anne Shirley. Vigil in the Night is also of interest in that it's one of Lombard's rare post-1935 non-comedic roles.

Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night Claudette Colbert on TCM: Boom Town, Parrish, Midnight, Outpost In Malaya Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Boom Town (1940) Friends become rivals when they strike-it-rich in oil. Dir: Jack Conway. Cast: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert. Bw-119 mins. 8:00 Am The Secret Heart (1946) A recent widow tries to help her emotionally disturbed stepdaughter. Dir: Robert Z. Leonard. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson. Bw-97 mins. 10:00 Am The Secret Fury (1950) A mysterious figure tries to stop a woman's marriage by driving her mad. Dir: Mel Ferrer. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Robert Ryan, Jane Cowl. Bw-86 mins. 11:30 Am Three Came Home (1950) A woman fights to survive as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Dir: Jean Negulesco. Cast: Claudette Colbert, Patric Knowles, Florence Desmond. Bw-105 mins. 1:30 Pm Parrish (1961) When his mother marries into the tobacco business,...

It Happened One Night (1934) Direction: Frank Capra Cast: Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns Screenplay: Robert Riskin; from Samuel Hopkins Adams' short story "Night Bus" Oscar Movies Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica: It is a very rare thing when a light-hearted comedy, something that is quintessentially the stuff of a "good movie," breaches into that territory where the term "good film" can also be applied, but Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), adapted by Capra's longtime collaborator Robert Riskin from Samuel Hopkins Adams' short story "Night Bus," may be such an exception. Today, most people know Capra solely for his rediscovered classic It's a Wonderful Life, made a dozen years later, but It Happened One Night was his first stab at what most critics would label greatness. The fact that the film is a comedy is all...