Oscars 1934: A Clean Sweep

“They threw a party for Harry Cohn,” read Daily Variety the day after the Oscar ceremony, which saw Columbia studio head Cohn’s screwball comedy It Happen One Night snatch up all of the four major awards plus screenplay—a feat not to be duplicated until The Silence of the Lambs 57 years later. The Frank Capra-directed film was, at inception, a bit of an underdog, with a bewildering array of actors and actresses turning it down and those that didn’t—Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert—regarding the film as more of a chore than a swell opportunity. Come Oscar night, the awards for the film piled up so that, when presenter Irvin S. Cobb opened the envelope to reveal the Best Picture winner, he simply said, “The winner is…you guessed it, it is something that…,” to which the audience responded, “…happened one night!”

BEST PICTURE
It Happened One Night

BEST DIRECTOR
Frank Capra, It Happened One Night

BEST ACTOR
Clark Gable, It Happened One Night

BEST ACTRESS
Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

October 17

Rita Hayworth is born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, 1918. In an early role, she played Barbara Stanwyck’s sister in A Message to Garcia (1936) at Fox. Few people saw her performance, as her scenes were cut Darryl F. Zanuck after a test screening. Her manager and first husband Edward Judson maneuvered her to Columbia, where studio head Harry Cohn had her hairline raised through electrolysis and gave her a new name. She attracted attention in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), became a star with You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) and reached the heights with Gilda (1946), a movie that was a blessing and curse in one. “Every man I have ever known has fallen in love with Gilda and awakened with me,” Hayworth once said. “No one can be Gilda 24 hours a day.”