The Sincerest Form of Flattery…

In this month’s Vanity Fair, in a feature called “Ain’t We Got Style?” , they posed stars of this summer’s movies as stars in “Depression-era classics”. Featured are  It Happened One Night, 42nd Street, Letty Lynton, My Man Godfrey, The Grapes of Wrath and two movies set in the 1930’s: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Paper Moon. 

James Marsden and Rose Byrne are posed as Clark and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night:

Runaway heiress, love triangle, gruff but adorable journalist–Frank Capra’s 1934 classic has everything a screwball on-the-road comedy should to take the mind off foreclosures and bank closures. The most iconic scene (apart from the one where Clark Gable removed his shirt, revealing no undershirt, and wiped out an entire industry) is the hitchhiking sequence. gable invokes the language of the thumb. Claudette Colbert trumps him with the power of her gams.

Nice to see Hollywood giving these silver screen classics a nod. And if it makes just one person go check out It Happened One Night, it’s worth it to me. Marsden is certainly no Gable, but at least he attempted the squint!

Here’s some outtakes from the photo shoot: