Remember the Night (1940)

Official trailer

Remember the Night is Mitchell Leisen’s 1940 American romantic drama about a Manhattan prosecutor who postpones a shoplifter’s trial until after Christmas and, learning she has nowhere to spend the holidays, takes her home to Indiana for Christmas with his mother.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Lee Leander. Fred MacMurray plays John Sargent. Beulah Bondi plays Mrs. Sargent. Elizabeth Patterson plays Aunt Emma. Sterling Holloway plays Willie. Willard Robertson plays Francis X. O’Leary.

Preston Sturges wrote the screenplay, his last work as a screenwriter before he moved to directing his own scripts. Paramount released the film in January 1940 to modest commercial reception, though its critical reputation has grown considerably since.

What catches me off guard about Remember the Night is how much it hurts. It looks like a cozy Christmas romance, and it is one for a while, but Sturges won’t let Lee off the hook for what she did, and I respect him enormously for that. I’d rate it higher if the travel scenes moved with the same grace as the Indiana ones.

Sturges’s screenplay treats the romance as serious moral territory instead of as comic confection. Lee is guilty of theft. John intends to prosecute her after Christmas. The film doesn’t resolve this through plot mechanism. It resolves through Lee’s eventual decision to take responsibility for what she did and John’s eventual recognition that their growing love doesn’t change the legal facts of her case.

The film argues that adult people can fall in love while also accepting that the love doesn’t override the moral and legal structure they live inside. The ending is consequently more painful than the genre typically allows.

Preston Sturges’s Screenplay

This was Sturges’s last screenplay before he transitioned to directing. The Great McGinty would follow within months. Remember the Night shows the screenwriter at the height of his commercial-writing craft before he moved into the satirical comedy mode that would define his later career. The screenplay’s tonal range from outright comedy through romance to real moral seriousness foreshadows the later Sturges films.

The cow-fence sequence and the comic episode at the Pennsylvania farmhouse with the rural justice of the peace are vintage Sturges comic mode. The Indiana Christmas-eve sequences and the closing courtroom scenes are something different: warmer, more vulnerable, more sad. Sturges could do both tones and the film moves between them without strain.

Stanwyck and MacMurray

Stanwyck and MacMurray would reunite four years later for Double Indemnity, the most famous film noir of the period. Remember the Night is the warm twin of that collaboration. The chemistry that would later carry murder and adultery here carries Christmas and forgiveness. The same two actors play two completely different relationships with equal conviction.

MacMurray’s John Sargent is one of his best dramatic roles. The character must be both a competent prosecutor and a man capable of empathy, and MacMurray gives John the easy professional confidence the role requires while letting the gentler currents through in the Indiana sequences. The performance laid groundwork for the more complex MacMurray of the 1940s.

MacMurray is good here, but Stanwyck is the one I can’t stop watching. She plays Lee hard-edged and wary and lets the Indiana kindness get to her so gradually that I can’t point to the moment it happens.

The Indiana Christmas Sequences

Beulah Bondi’s Mrs. Sargent is the film’s quietest revelation. The character welcomes Lee into the family home without knowing Lee’s situation, then learns the full story and continues to welcome her with no diminishment of warmth. Bondi plays this without sentimentality. The kindness simply is the character.

Bondi breaks my heart. Mrs. Sargent learns the whole story and keeps treating Lee with exactly the same warmth, and Bondi plays it so simply that I believe every minute of it.

The Christmas Eve scenes in the Indiana farmhouse have a settled rhythm the New York and travel scenes lack.

Leisen lets sequences breathe. The piano singing, the Christmas morning gifts and the comic interlude in the cow barn each get time to settle before the film moves on, and I’d happily spend another twenty minutes in that house. The pastoral interval gives the closing courtroom scene its weight.

Does Remember the Night still hold up?

I’d call Remember the Night a hidden classic of Christmas cinema and the romantic drama, and it’s an 8 for me because the Indiana stretch and that painful, honest ending outweigh a slower start. The Sturges screenplay, the Stanwyck and MacMurray chemistry and Beulah Bondi’s quiet performance make it more durable than the period’s usual romantic comedies. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their holiday films with a little ache in them.

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