Considering its subject, ["It Happened One Night"] is better than it has any right to be—better acted, better directed, better written…. [Everybody] being in love with everybody else in pleasantly conclusive fashion, there enters more confusion as to who loves whom and why than might be expected of a Molière comedy. Barring the incidents of the bus ride, the outlines of the story have a deadly enough familiarity all through anyway. What the picture as a whole shows is that by changing such types as the usual pooh-bah father and city editor into people with some wit and feeling, by consistently preferring the light touch to the heavy, and by casting actors who are thoroughly up to the work of acting, you can make some rather comely and greenish grasses grow where there was only alkali dust before. (p. 364)
Otis C. Ferguson, "Worth Seeing," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1934 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 78, No. 1014, May 9, 1934, pp. 364-65.
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