When you ask anyone to name a movie that paired Barbara Stanwyck with Fred MacMurray, that answer is always going to be Billy Wilder's noir classic Double Indemnity. But the fact is that these two Hollywood icons made four movies together, including the sappy Douglas Sirk tearjerker There's Always Tomorrow. Their first pairing together was 1940's Remember The Night, a forgotten holiday classic directed by Mitchell Liesen. More importantly, the film was written by one of Hollywood's greatest screenwriters, Preston Sturges.
Remember The Night starts off with Lee Leander (Stanwyck) stealing a bracelet from a New York department store just before Christmas. She gets caught and taken to court, but the jury hearing the case has their mind on Christmas shopping, so Assistant District Attorney John Sargeant (MacMurray) asks the judge to delay the case until the New Year. By that point, he figures that the jury will no longer be overcome by holiday spirits and less likely to acquit. However, this means that Lee will have to spend the holidays in jail. John is a bit too chivalrous for his own good, so he agrees to keep an eye on her.
Since he has to go to Wabash, Indiana and Lee's mother is on the way, John takes her on his Christmas trip home (apparently, in 1940, you could leave a state while out on bail). John's mother (Beulah Bondi, of course) and his Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson) let Lee stay with open arms, a strong contrast to her mother, who always saw her as a thief. It's a truly heartbreaking moment when Lee's mother rejects her at her most vulnerable moment, when she's just looking for some family to spend the holidays with. Anyway, in typical Old Hollywood fashion, Lee and John discover that they love each other as they try to decide what to do when they go back to New York.
While Remember The Night is filled with some light touches of Sturges-style humor, it's important to remember that this is not a Sturges film by any stretch. He may have solo screenwriting credit, but this film is very different from The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story. Liesen had a knack for imposing his own ideas on a script, so it's no wonder why he drove both Sturges and Wilder to direct themselves. For example, the opening courtroom scene is so clearly a Sturges-written moment, with fast-paced and overlapping dialogue and there are some other great one-liners that remain in the film. But, for the most part, Liesen keeps the film grounded, slows the pace and takes out any cynicism Sturges may have given the piece originally.
But of course, this doesn't mean that Remember The Night is a bad movie. It's filled with great examples of beauty only the Hollywood of 1940 could produce. Ted Tetzlaff's cinematography is gorgeous, highlighted by an incredible shot of the couple at Niagara Falls. Stanwyck and MacMurray are clearly in front of a process shot of the waterfall, but the lighting of the two – highlighting their silhouettes and with their faces in complete darkness – make the shot believable. (Tetzlaff also shot Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, My Man Godfrey and a few other comedy classics.)
Stanwyck doesn't give one of her best performances here, but she always puts in everything for each scene. There's a fantastic moment she shares with Bondi. It makes you feel like Stanwyck had spent her whole life just like her character and was finally relieved to have someone – anyone – show an ounce of love towards her. In that sense, Remember The Night is like many other holiday movies. The film is more than about the love between two people, but really about finding the love within a family.
Remember The Night isn't a perfect film – the ending is too rushed and the zany, fast-talking Sturges-style is missing – but this is a great holiday classic. Maybe Christmas isn't in the title but the holidays are important here. Without them, Lee doesn't get to experience the love that she's been missing from her life, the same kind of love that everyone should experience.
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