It Happened One Night Beat Sheet

It Happened One Night 
Movie Poster

Here is my attempt at the Beat Sheet for It Happened One Night (1934). If you would like more information about beat sheets and the 15 beats every great movies shares, check out this page. 

Opening Image – The film opens on a yacht. Ellie Andrews has been locked in her stateroom by her wealthy father until he can get an annulment through for her recent elopement. Her father is complaining that she is on a hunger strike. 

Set-up – Ellie escapes the yacht and swims to Miami where she hocks her watch to buy clothes and a bus ticket to New York where her husband waits. In the meantime, Peter Warne is a down-on-his luck newspaper reporter who has just been fired by his boss in New York City. He, too, is taking the bus to New York. 

Theme Stated  – In modern screenplays, the theme is normally stated to the protagonist around minute 5. In this movie, the theme is one of growing independence. 

Catalyst – Ellie gets on the bus and travels to New York. 

Debate – There is not much debate before Act Two, more set up to get to the main part of the movie. 

Break Into Two  – Act Two is the upside world of Ellie traveling on a bus with little to no money and only Peter to help. 

B Story – Peter Warne, the newspaperman, at first follows Ellie to get a story and later falls in love with her. 

Fun and Games –  We see Peter and Ellie at various bus stops.  They go to a motel where they have to share a room. 

Midpoint - A man on the bus recognizes Ellie and wants to return her to her father for a $10,000 reward. Peter manages to turn him away but they must now leave the bus. 

Bad Guys Close In – Ellie and Peter have no money. Peter's suitcase gets stolen. All they have to eat is carrots. They stay at a motel without any means to pay for it. 

All is Lost – Ellie gets woken up in the middle of the night to find that Peter is gone. She thinks that he has left her. She calls her father to get his help. Peter passes them as they leave the town and sees her with her husband. 

Dark Night of the Soul – Both Peter and Ellie are devastated. 

Break Into Three – Ellie decides that she should just go ahead and remarry her husband in a large wedding and forget about Peter, especially after she thinks he wants to collect the reward. 

Finale – Peter comes to visit Ellie's father and only wants the money he spent on getting her home, not the reward. He tells her father that he loves Ellie. As her father walks Ellie down the aisle, he tells her that Peter didn't want the reward, and that she should not get married. She leaves in the middle of the ceremony to find Peter. 

Final Image – In one of the coolest endings, we see the outside of the Ellie and Peter's motel room, hear a trumpet sound, and see a blanket (the walls of Jericho) fall before the screen goes black. 

6. Cavalcade (1933)

Cavalcade Movie Poster

Cavalcade won the Academy Award for best picture in 1933. Before today I knew nothing of the movie more than its name. However, I love Noel Coward, and this was based on a play he wrote in 1931. What I didn't expect is that I would be watching a precursor to Downton Abbey and its upstairs/downstairs dichotomy. Ironically, Cavalcade even includes the Titanic disaster, just as Downton. I wonder if Julian Fellowes was in any way affected by this tale. 

Cast of Downton Abbey

Cavalcade follows the story of two families in England: One the wealthy owners of a home in London and the other their servants. It starts on New Year's Eve, 1899. Interestingly, we can now relate in some ways to the feelings of those who brought in the change in the millennium. And that is what this movie is really about: how the world changed from 1899 to 1933. The movie does not present the changes as pretty or nice in any way. We encounter a world of increasingly dangerous wars, changes in the social order, the evils of alcohol, and the movement away from God.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Herbert Mundin as Alfred Bridges, Diana Wynyard as
Jane Marryot, Clive Brook as Robert Marryot, and
Una O'Connor as Ellen Bridges in Cavalcade

This moral tale builds slowly. At first, it is just the story of two women, both whose husbands are going away to serve in the Boer War. The master and servant are both shipping out at the same time. They leave behind their wives and children. However, they both return and do not seem that changed by the war. However, the servant, Robert Bridges, has bought himself a pub from someone who decided to stay in Africa. He and his wife, mother, and daughter move to the pub.

The story fast forwards and Bridges is now a drunkard who rarely pays his bills. His wife sends him away so that he won't embarrass her when 'her Ladyship', Lady Jane Marryot, comes to visit. He comes back early and interrupts, causing a scene. He leaves the house, gets in a fist fight, and then is killed by a coach and four.

Margaret Lindsay as Edith Harris and
John Warburton as Edward Marryot on
their honeymoon aboard the Titanic.

The next scene has the two families meet up at Brighton Beach. Bridge's daughter, Fanny, is a young but considered a wonderful dancer. The Marryots are all there, and the elder son, Edward, is going to marry a woman named Edith. This scene quickly follows with them standing together on a ship, talking about first their love. Then they move into more serious territory with Edith saying that she doesn't think that their relationship will be happy in the long run, that things are different than they were in the past. They step away to reveal they are on the Titanic.

Later, World War I begins, and Joey can't wait to join. Before he does, he rediscovers Fanny and they start an intimate relationship which continues each time he has leave. He returns to the front one last time after asking her to marry him. She basically says that even though she loves him, that she will not. That their lives are just too different. On the front, he sees his father one last time. The armistice is called for, but Joey dies before it takes effect.

This is where the filmmakers throw the issues of the day in our faces. They start by showing the men injured during the war, even weaving baskets - a scene that today would be seen as sarcastic but was completely believable at the time. Then we break to a number of short scenes with discussions about disarmament followed by talk of keeping stores of mustard gas. We see a man speak out against the existence of God followed by a priest proclaming from Luke 9:25: "For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose or forfeit his own self?" This is followed by Fanny Bridges singing the "Twentieth Century Blues," which includes the theme of the movie, "In this hurly burly of insanity, our dreams cannot last long." I'm including the scene below to show what I mean:



Finally, the film ends on another New Year's Eve in 1933 with Sir Robert and Lady Jane Marryott together toasting the future. However, even though Robert is still positive about it, Lady Jane is more realistic. She states, "[Let's] drink to the hope that this country of ours which we love so much will find dignity and greatness and peace again."

What I Learned From the Movie

1. The filmmakers needed to a do a little more showing and a little less telling. I don't believe I've ever had a theme or these type of moral messages thrown in my face quite as obviously as what happened in the last third of this movie. Even though I think that most of the message was quite good, it should have been incorporated within the framework of the movie and not as a sequence in and of itself. Instead of feeling preached to, I would have felt that I was experiencing the changes along with the characters. 
2. Transitions are so important to keeping a movie flowing. In these early days of film, they still hadn't gotten scene transitions down. There were many abrupt scene changes that were jarring to the viewer and broke the 'fictive dream' that the story was attempting to tell. 
3. Some scenes dragged on too long. There was too much exposition and not enough movement. This was especially true during some of the song numbers. This was not a musical, yet at least three times in the movie we listened to entire songs. Even though these included commentaries on the time, they made me as a modern movie goer a little frustrated. Important lesson for me in my own writing endeavors. 
4. As a way to show the tragedies of the war, the filmmaker juxtaposed images of soldiers marching and  singing songs like "Smile, Smile, Smile" while women back home were singing to inspire men to enlist while men were falling over dying in front of the same church. If this sounds like a jumbly mess, it was. The sounds were dissonant, but not in a way that added to the drama. Instead, they made me wish for a better sound mixer. The images were repetitive, and the fact that they all died in the exact same spot even though new years (1915, 1916, 1917) were being shown on the screen was just silly. 
5. Throughout the movie, the women are portrayed as realists, and the men are children. The women understand that war means death, and the men are jumping to go fight again and again. The men talk of love, and the women talk of the uncertainties of the future. It seems like in many of these early movies, the screenwriters picked sides in the battle of the sexes. Women were either silly or smart, men were either in control or oblivious. 
6. While we might think all things change, in reality life just seems to repeat itself. Here is a generation back in 1933 writing about the 'good old days'. Today, many look back at the 50's in the same way. Someday soon, the 80's will be the time to remember. I can see myself in my old age railing about the way kids behave. Someday. 
7. I loved the relationship of the Marryotts throughout the film. It was gentle and loving and rarely seen in movies. 

In the end, I enjoyed the movie despite its shortcomings. Of course, that could be chalked up to me being an anglophile and loving all things Downton and Mr. Selfridge!

4. Cimarron

Cimarron Movie Poster

I love old westerns. They bring back memories of childhood, watching John Wayne with my Daddy. That's why when I saw that #4 on the list was a western, I got really excited. What I found was that while this western wasn't exactly what I expected, it was fascinating in many ways.

Cimarron takes place in the early days of the Oklahoma Land Run in 1889. The tale starts on the morning of the Land Run, and the scene that ensues once it begins is utter chaos as wagons laden with people and men and women on horseback ride off to find their perfect claim. There's even a man on a bicycle in the run. It was amazing to me to watch this scene, and I wonder how many people and animals got hurt in its filming.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The tale centers around a pioneering newspaper editor named Yancey Cravat who moves to Oklahoma with his wife and son to be part of the excitement. He likens the results of the land run to the miracle of creation. They are joined by a stowaway, Isaiah, an African-American boy who has escaped the harsh realities of life as a servant in Wichita, Kansas.

Irene Dunn as Sabra and Richard Dix as Yancey Cravat
 in Cimarron

Yancey is an enigmatic figure. He is well known throughout the state and the territory. He was once a lawyer before becoming a newspaper editor. And he has a unique way at looking at the world. He truly believes in treating those around him with complete and utter respect. Where others look down on the Cherokee and treat them with disdain, he understands their plight and sympathizes with them. Along with the Indians, he also stands up for a Jewish man and a woman of ill repute. Further, he's an excellent shot and one of the first actions he does when he moves to town is to kill the leader of a gang. Ironically, this takes place in the middle of a sermon he's been asked to give since there is no preacher in town. The realities of the wild west! When he kills the outlaw called 'The Kid', he turns down the idea of a reward. He knew 'The Kid' before he had turned bad and felt that circumstances had led him to a life of crime. He felt bad for killing him but knew that he had to protect his family and community.

All of the above makes Yancey seem truly heroic. However, there was a huge chink in his armor: as the Allman Brothers would sing many years later, he was born a ramblin' man. He told his wife that the longest he'd ever been in a place was five years and it felt like a jail sentence. Once they were established in Osage, Oklahoma, Yancey decided to leave his wife Sabra with a son and a baby daughter in 1893.

Irene Dunne in Cimarron

To me, this is when I realized that the story was really not about Yancey, but instead about Sabra. She takes over the paper and makes it flourish. She still is true to him and leaves his name on it as editor. She knows he'll return. And he does in 1898 after serving in the Spanish American War.


Things look good again. Time flies and in 1907, he's running to be governor. Oil has been discovered on the Osage Reservation. When a city elder tries to get him involved in a scheme to take the oil from them, he is disgusted and chooses to write an editorial about the plight of the Indians. In this, he calls for them to get complete citizenship in the United States. His wife begs him not to do it because she knows it will ruin his chances in the election, but he says he must. Then he leaves her again.

Statue at the end of Cimarron

We jump forward to 1929 and see Sabra has modernized the paper, and it is thriving under her. She still believes in Yancey and has kept his name as the editor. Then by 1930, we see that she has been elected to Congress. She goes to visit an oil well with visiting dignitaries when an explosion is averted by a man who has sacrificed himself to save the rest. It is Yancey. His last words to her are: "Wife and Mother. Stainless woman. Hide me. Hide me in your love." At the same time, a statue is being unveiled to the pioneer spirit. When the cloth is ripped off, it looks exactly like Yancey and a woman is crouching behind him.

Okay, so I finished the movie and was confused. Was Yancey a hero or not? While the movie portrayed him as larger than life throughout and his wife never truly complained or got angry with him for his leaving, I felt cold at the end. I knew the story was originally written by a woman, Edna Ferber. So I decided to do a little research. What I found made the entire story make sense to me: Cimarron is a satire. Here, the backbone of building the community was this strong woman, Sabra. In the book version of the story, Sabra is shown as being even more self reliant. She only found her own power because Yancey left her, becoming a feminist in the process. Plus, she understood the importance of women to 'civilizing' the territory. Without Sabra and women like her, the author implies, the territory would never have truly been tamed. The irony comes to full fruition at the end of the movie when the statue is revealed to not be a woman but a man, Yancey, portrayed as the protector of the weak and the true pioneer.

The movie was adapted from the book by screenwriter Howard Estabrook. His treatment of the story left out the irony and left a much weaker story for it, in my opinion. Nonetheless, I marvel at the scope of the movie for the time it was created. It cost more than $1.5 million dollars to create, extraordinarily expensive for the time. The Land Grab scene included more than 5,000 extras. It is one of only two films to receive Academy Award nominations in every category. (The other was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?)

Other thoughts:

1. I was amazed at the job the filmmakers did at showing how Osage developed from its earliest days where lawyers were working out of tents to settle land disputes to 1929 where it is a thriving metropolis. Each new year brought new buildings and modes of transportation. Further, the characters changed with the times. Really well done.
2. The filmmaker heavily relied on title cards to move from period to period. While some of this was fine, the ones that were full of exposition hearkened back to the days of silent pictures and seemed overly intrusive to the story. 
3. The evolution of Sabra from a bigot to an independent and tolerant woman was fascinating to watch. 

I will be putting up the Beat Sheet for this one soon. 

All Quiet on the Western Front Beat Sheet

All Quiet on the Western Front

Here is my attempt at the Beat Sheet for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). If you would like more information about beat sheets and the 15 beats every great movies shares, check out this page. 

Opening Image – The film opens with title cards describing the war. Then we see a woman washing the floor and a man opens a window on a scene of soldiers marching through the town to songs and cheers. 

Set-up – The war has begun and young men are enlisting everywhere. A teacher calls on his students to enlist, inspiring them to take up arms in defense of the 'fatherland'. When the teacher turns to the student's 'leader' Paul, he says that he will enlist and the others join suit. 

Theme Stated  – According to the Blake Snyder, someone states the 'theme' to the protagonist around the fifth minute of the movie.  However, I believe that the theme of this movie is the final title card before the movie begins which states, "It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." 

Catalyst – Teacher talks them all into enlisting. 

Debate – Typically, there is some debate before the protagonist begins his journey in the main part of the film. However, once the young men decide, the next scene is in the training camp. This is the beginning of their understanding that life is going to be different. The question, however, in this part is about surviving these changes. 

Break Into Two  – The soldiers are sent to the upside-down world of the Front. 

B Story – The love story is between Paul and Katczinski who acts as his mentor and friend throughout the story. 

Fun and Games – The men learn about what war is really like. They experience the trenches and no man's land. 

Midpoint – Paul's friend Franz has died and Paul is losing his positive attitude. According to him, he never truly understood what death was about, and he never valued his own life so much as before. 

Bad Guys Close In – Fighting gets worse. Paul gets caught in the foxhole where he kills a Frenchman with a knife. He is later wounded and sent to a hospital. He is then sent home. 

All is Lost – Once Paul gets sent home, he realizes that the people there are clueless to the realities of war.

Dark Night of the Soul – Paul doesn't really fit in. He decides to tell the young students in his old school what war is really like to his teacher's chagrin. 

Break Into Three – Paul realizes he must return to the front. 

Finale – He goes back to the front to find Katczinski. Once he finds him, they reconnect. However, Katczinski is killed. Then as Paul reaches for a butterfly, he is shot by a sniper. 

Final Image – The young men are shown marching, just like in the beginning, but this time against the backdrop of a field of soldier's gravestones. 

3. All Quiet on the Western Front

Movie Poster for All Quiet
on the Western Front

This is the first movie on the list that I have seen before. In high school, we read the book and watched the movie. I found that watching it as an adult, now that I have taught over a thousand students and have children of my own, has brought new and deeper to me.

The movie is a realistic look at war. In that way it is related to so many modern war movies like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Saving Private Ryan. In fact, I had forgotten how realistic and disturbing the battle scenes were in the movie. In fact, 68 years later people would be talking about how realistic and bloody Saving Private Ryan was in its opening scene. However, All Quiet on the Western Front did it first. The first time that the newly trained unit moves up to the front and experiences life in the trenches with the enemy rushing towards them through 'No Man's Land', Paul, the protagonist, watches as a man who has grasped the barbed wire near him is hit by a bomb. When the smoke clears, only two hands cut off at the wrist are still grasping the wire. Jarring, disturbing, and created in 1930.

The fact that the story from the German point of view makes it even more moving for me. Typically, we 'root' for the protagonists not only because they are the focus of the story, but also in war movies because we are from the same culture, the same background. However, the point of the movie is exactly that: it doesn't matter whose side the fighters are on, the men at the front are all the same. While some might have a bit of a clue about why they are fighting, they didn't start the war. However, many of them will die. It begs the question, why?

While I'm not a pacifist, I do believe in war for a purpose. When I look at past wars, World War I is one that stands out as so stupid. Countries were pulled in based on their previous agreements without having been directly attacked or even threatened with attack. I guess, for me, it is much easier to understand a war like World War II where the men and women were fighting a true evil. However, just having this train of thought makes me feel somewhat like the old men in All Quiet who sit around and comment on the war without having actually been on the front lines.

Compared with the previous two winners, All Quiet on the Western Front was so much better. The actors were believable, the emotions were real, the movie had a good mix for small laughs with large tragedies, the filming was a step up from just two years previous, and the sound problems seem to mostly have been worked out.

SPOILER ALERT

Boys in a Fervor After They've Decided to Enlist in
All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front starts in a classroom, quite a statement about education and youth. An old professor who probably never saw the hint of a gun stirs up his youthful students to join en masse - for the Fatherland. It is SO IMPORTANT to remember the effect we teachers have on our students. The students led by Paul Baumer, the groups unofficial leader, leave the classroom with visions of heroism. But these ideas start to be stripped away on the first day of training.

Local postman Corporal Himmelstoss is in charge of their platoon. And he is merciless and cruel. Case in point: when his higher ups tell him to give the men leave until midnight the day before they move to the front, he causes them to miss it. He is not dissimilar from the Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.

When the group gets to the front, the reality of war sets in quickly. There is no food. They stay in burnt out buildings, finding places to sleep where they can. Luckily they have Stanislaus Katczinski who takes on the role of the mentor and father figure for the soldiers. Over the course of the movie, he and Paul grow incredibly close.

When the men move to the trenches, the constant bombardment leads many to go crazy. Once the bombardment stops, the soldiers rush out and wait for the attackers to run across No Man's Land. This is when things really get brutal. The opposing forces overrun the trench and bayonets and fists fly. Death surrounds the men.

Over the course of the movie, the soldiers have brief respites between intense battles. At one point, only 80 out of 150 come back. As the men get to rest and eat double rations, the famous scene of the movie occurs where they discuss how the war started and how they really don't have anything against the men they are fighting and killing. Paul and two of his buddies also get to spend one night with some French women.

Paul With French Soldier in a Foxhole
All Quiet on the Western Front

At one point, Paul has sheltered in a foxhole when a French soldier jumps in. Paul knifes him, but he doesn't die immediately. Over the course of the long bombardment, Paul alternates between anger at the man and regret for having hurt and eventually killed him.

When Paul gets wounded, he gets sent home on leave. He finds that things have changed from his perspective. The people don't have any understanding of what he has gone through and  he feels little connection to his old life. When his old teacher asks him to help him inspire his new class of students to join up and fight in the war, Paul can't say much more than that war means death. In the end, Paul realizes that he feels more at home on the battlefield with Kat than back at home.

He returns to the front and immediately reconnects with Kat who is out looking for food. However,on the way back to the rest of the men, Kat is killed. Paul has lost his only true friend. The movie closes soon after when he reaches for a butterfly and gets shot by a sniper. All noises cease - all is quiet. Finally, we see images of the young soldiers marching superimposed over an immense soldier's graveyard.

Closing Images of All Quiet on the Western Front

I will be posting my attempt at the Beat Sheet for this later today. Stay Tuned.