Brother, can you spare a can of food?

If so, you can gain admission to the Depression-themed films in this year’s “Big Read” series

MILFORD, PA — Film authority John DiLeo will host a screening of “It Happened One Night” at the Columns Museum on Friday, May 23 at 7:00 p.m. as part of “The Big Read” series on the Great Depression. Admission to the films in the series is free, but a donation of canned goods is requested to feed those feeling the pinch of our current hard times.

“It Happened One Night” (1934) is the screen’s quintessential (and most imitated) romantic comedy. It won the Best Picture Oscar, plus additional Oscars for its director Frank Capra and stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It has as many classic moments as any Hollywood classic, most notably its priceless hitchhiking scene (in which Colbert’s gam proves mightier than Gable’s thumb). Colbert is a runaway heiress and Gable is a slick reporter, but this road-trip film’s background is one of the more vivid contemporary portraits of the Depression, visible everywhere Gable and Colbert find themselves. The movie celebrates the pluck of ordinary folks, with Colbert’s rich girl fairly useless (until love redeems her). This peerless comedy is ageless, as funny and appealing and transporting today as it was in 1934.

Next up in the series will be a showing of “42nd Street” at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, May 30 at the Dingman-Delaware Middle School.