Remember the Night (1940)
Remember the Night (1940)
Directed by Mitchell Leisen
Barbara Stanwyck is one of our favorite actresses at our house, and Fred MacMurray one of our favorite actors, so to get them together in one movie is a knockout. Sure, we know about Double Indemnity, where they both play villains and end up dead — the essential American film noir. And it wasn’t the only time when usual good-guy and sometimes goofball MacMurray played a villain: see him as the cowardly sower of discord in The Caine Mutiny, and the evil hypocrite boss in The Apartment. And we know that Barbara Stanwyck could play women as tough as nails, but in this film she really has to show her range. That’s because she plays Lee, a common thief arrested just before Christmas, with a sour view of human nature and this muddled life of ours — and when we meet her hard-hearted mother, we know why. But because it’s Christmas, and the lawyer who is to prosecute her, a young man named John Sargent (MacMurray), doesn’t want her to have to spend it behind bars, he takes her to his old home on a farm in Indiana — after, that is, her own mother shuts the door on her. The route he has to take, because they end up being sort of like fugitives from justice, is a bit circuitous, going through Canada and past Niagara Falls. And what can you do if you’re a kind hearted manly fellow and a beautiful and sensitive woman down on your luck, if you are going past Niagara Falls? You begin to fall in love, though you hardly know that that is what is happening.
But the real heart of the film is at the lawyer’s home, where we meet his widowed mother, played to perfection by Beulah Bondi, who feels sorry for the girl and who wants only good things for her, but who feels she must nevertheless protect her son. John, you see, has bright prospects, and he too grew up in tough circumstances, working hard for every dollar, and devoting it all to his home and his schooling. Mrs. Sargent is thus faced with two good things that seem impossible to have at once, and she chooses for her son. We also meet John’s maiden Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson; you may remember her as Lucy’s daft mother in I Love Lucy), and their live-in farmhand Willie (Sterling Holloway; the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh in the Disney cartoons). Aunt Emma has a wedding dress she never got to wear, and perhaps because of her disappointment, she is not so secretly in favor of the love she sees blooming between John and Lee. But none of this is sentimental. At that farm, Lee experiences, perhaps for the first time in her life, what a home is, and it is sweet and painful, because she knows she does not belong; and whether she can ever belong is the crux of the story.
The great Preston Sturges wrote the screenplay, full of jests that are brightly comical but that also strike like lances. He knows human nature, and that’s enough to make anybody into a cynic, but he resists the easy cynicism all the same, and pulls, as always, for the underdog. And, as in so many of his films (The Lady Eve, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Sullivan’s Travels), you cannot guess the ending, not even two minutes before. Watch the masters at work, and if you like it as much as we do, you’ll make it a Christmastime tradition!
I try to share as many of these as I can and a friend pointed this out:
"One correction needed...the actress that plays the aunt later went on to play not Lucy Ricardo's mother but her babysitter, Mrs. Trumbull."
I think this is the movie I saw on TCM several years ago in which MacMurray uses the word "hobbit." In a strange context, used seemingly as a synonym for jailbird. I had to rewind to make sure I did not mishear. It is chronologically possible (book published 1937) but seems like a visitor from a distant universe. Could it be a bit of obscure slang independent of Tolkien?