It Happened One Night, the Great Depression and Exodus Politics

One of the biggest movies of 1934 was Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. Off to a slow start in urban locations, the movie gradually picked up speed as it trickled down to rural venues where it presumably was met by audiences who shared its core values. The movie’s attraction has long been explained by the utopian a melting of social classes it presents. Rather than a classless society, I argue that It Happened One Night explicitly enacts the romance of a woman’s downward mobility and, perhaps more significantly, a control of her (dangerous) mobility through domestic enclosure. In this paper, I argue for a renewed reading of Capra’s It Happened One Night in light of Michael Walzer’s concept of “Exodus politics” focusing on gender. I start with a short discussion of Walzer’s influential concept, to follow with an in-depth look at the metaphor as it operates in the film. I finish by suggesting that “Exodus politics” helped in solidifying both a male and a female audience in the context of the Great Depression.