Daily Dialogue — May 18, 2019

“Excuse me, lady, but that upon which you sit is mine.”

— It Happened One Night (1934), screen play by Robert Riskin, short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Meet Cute.

Trivia: It Happened One Night became the first film to perform a “clean sweep” of the top five Academy Award categories, known as the Oscar “grand slam”: 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 in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992. However, It Happened One Night is the only one not nominated in any other category.

Dialogue On Dialogue: In an era in which the powers that be were cracking down on supposedly immoral content emerging from Hollywood, leading to the adoption of the Hays Code, screenwriters were forced to become adroit at writing suggestive subtext as with this line as part of the meet cute in It Happened One Night.