REMEMBER THE NIGHT, Mitchell Leisen (1940) / She steals her way to Christmas

Moved to pity by the Christmas season, New York District Attorney John Sargent lets pretty shoplifter Lee Leander out on bail and offers her a ride home to Indiana. Along the way they have a run-in with a Pennsylvania sheriff, meet each others' parents, and eventually fall in love. John's mother, however, disapproves, and warns Lee to stay away, lest she damage John's career. Not wanting to cause trouble, Lee resolves to leave the man she loves.

Director: Mitchell Leisen
Producers: Mitchell Leisen and Albert Lewis for Paramount Pictures
Starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck
Screenplay by Preston Sturges
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Edited by Doane Harrison
Music by Frederick Hollander
Release date: 19 January 1940
Running time: 1h 34m

HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream Remember the Night online, visit [[JustWatch.com](http://justwatch.com/)] and TV.Movie. (Besides what's listed there, it's also available on YouTube and Google Play.) Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, December 20. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 12/19 in order to ensure being admitted.

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Few films can match Remember the Night for attaining the sublime and the cringeworthy in one effort. That alone makes it a satisfying watch, and a characteristic it holds in common with any number of Christmas celebrations. Think two sweaters, one cashmere and another strewn with tinsel and fake bulbs, cohabiting as two presents under the same tree. Partly that stems from screenwriter Preston Sturges's habit of combining darkness and sentimentality in equal measure, and partly from over-the-top production design used to draw a contrast between urban and rural settings.

There are two poles Remember the Night touches, on the one hand the first and third acts setting up and resolving the story of Lee and John, both chapters bringing nuance and good humor and dramatic tension to their dynamic, and on the other the abysmal second act, threatening to smother the film with stereotypes. (A rare swing-and-miss from costuming legend Edith Head in fashioning Barbara Stanwyck's wedding dress, perhaps at the director's behest, didn't help.) Rubes and hayseeds fill the barn to bursting, and the scenes at Niagara Falls are virtually all stock footage and clichés. But whenever Lee's crime and the courtroom drama it sets in motion come into play, the film achieves its potential.

This is the first of four films Stanwyck and MacMurray made together, reaching forward to 1956. (Double Indemnity came second in 1944.) MacMurray carries a significant load, inhabiting the skin of an already-jaded young prosecutor with enough heart to feel what Lee might need. His staged brutality in questioning Lee at the end works both as strategic mind in motion and as desperate heart overflowing. But in the end this is Stanwyck's movie to heft or drop, and carry it she does. When she's alone in the Sargent farmhouse, pondering the possible scenarios of how all this might end, we tremble along with her on a precipice of uncertainty she can't turn away from. She knows the depth of her feeling for John, but has no idea how to float or swim on it, how to breathe in this strange atmosphere of family relationships, how to test and see the risks involved. She only knows that risk throws long shadows into the new light suddenly dawning. So when she takes the boldest possible step, pleading guilty to her crime, we understand what that decision has cost her, not only the loss of John (for the duration of her sentence?) but her sense of existential security – and we're persuaded of the purity of an extraordinary heart.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKcLcT9dOFk

Rotten Tomatoes: Tomatometer 100%, based on 13 reviews
Metacritic: 78, "generally favorable," based on 11 reviews

Remember the Night has been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Sturges summarized the film by saying, "Love reformed her and corrupted him." The film, he said, "... had quite a lot of schmaltz [sentiment], a good dose of schmerz [pain, grief] and just enough schmutz [dirt] to make it box office."

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
In its way, Remember the Night is as full of the improbabilities of any of the more familiar Christmas movies that we ritually rewatch in this season every year. But it's also no less lacking in the affirmation it makes of the power of love, its ability to melt even the coldest of hearts, to transform our feelings for our fellow man and woman. If that's a feeling you treasure in your holiday viewing, remember the film. ∞ Robert Faires, Austin Chronicle

It is a memorable film, in title and in quality, blessed with an honest script, good direction and sound performances ... a drama stated in the simplest human terms of comedy and sentiment, tenderness and generosity ... warm, pleasant and unusually entertaining. ∞ Frank S, Nugent, The New York Times (January 1940)

Blessed with a characteristically brut champagne script by Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen’s Remember the Night is special even by the bright standards of the romantic comedies that Hollywood studios pulled off so breezily in 1940. It’s the cinematic equivalent of oven-warm gingerbread ....The premise may be fancifully contrived, but the human stakes here are entirely authentic, with a moral and romantic outlook that’s exquisitely perceptive and generous. Four years before their more celebrated pairing in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck and MacMurray perfected a comfortable, crackling star chemistry, tossing Sturges’s wry, whetstone-whittled lines back and forth like a beachball, and palpably enjoying themselves in the process. And the seasonal setting is hardly incidental: this is a Christmas film powered by a loving, unsentimental spirit of goodwill to all men, and not at the expense of one scrap of wit. Seventy-six years on, it fully deserves a place in the holiday canon. ∞ Guy Lodge, The Guardian

Taken from a script by Preston Sturges (his last before he graduated to directing), this is a winning romantic comedy-drama from the ever-elegant Leisen, who elicits a superb performance from Stanwyck as the hardboiled shoplifter faced with staying in jail over Christmas, but given bail by prosecuting attorney MacMurray and taken to visit his family for the holiday. Playing superbly on the personae of his leads, Leisen creates a movie of warmth and immense style, which never quite trips over into excessive sentimentality. ∞ Time Out

The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style. ∞ Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

It's one of those rare holiday films that's able to mix comedy with sentiment without being either unduly manic or unbearably sentimental. As such, it deserves to be better known and more frequently aired. ∞ Robert Blanco, USA Today

It's December, and Christmas movies have taken over the streaming platforms like lice at summer camp. Most are generic-new, some are old, and some are hidden classics, like the warm, funny, emotionally rich Remember the Night, a funny and achingly romantic little number .... Stanwyck has never been more appealing, a tough cookie thawing under the mistletoe, MacMurray reminds you that he was a terrific romantic comedy lead before My Three Sons domesticated him, and Beulah Bondi has one of the most touching roles of her long career as the prosecutor’s mother. The script is by the legendary Preston Sturges — his last before he ascended to the director’s chair — and the director is the under-sung Mitchell Leisen, who had a run of films at Paramount in the ‘30s and ‘40s that are witty, deeply moving, and often surprisingly sexy. This is one of them, and watch for that scene of MacMurray and Stanwyck on a night-time small-town porch, deepening their relationship with hushed, tender confidences; it’s one of the most intimate moments in all of classic cinema. ∞ Ty Burr on Substack