Mitchell Leisen (1940)
Preston Sturges’s script provides a fine premise for a romantic comedy. Assistant DA John (Jack) Sargent (Fred MacMurray) has a 100% record in successfully prosecuting female defendants. One early December, Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) is arrested for stealing a bracelet from a New York jewellery store and Jack’s boss (Paul Guilfoyle) assigns him the case. Jack knows that juries tend to be lenient when Christmas is coming and fears an acquittal for Lee, even though she’s obviously guilty (and not for the first time). Although her super-verbose defence attorney (Willard Robertson) has already delivered his speech to the jury, Jack succeeds, on a technicality, in getting the completion of the trial postponed until the New Year. Hearing Lee complain to her lawyer that she’ll now have to spend Christmas in jail, Jack feels guilty and arranges for a bondsman known as Fat Mike (Tom Kennedy) to post bail. To Jack’s consternation, Fat Mike then delivers Lee to Jack’s apartment – just as he’s about to set off for Indiana, to spend Christmas there with his folks. It turns out that Lee is a Hoosier too and she has nowhere else to go in New York. Jack offers her a lift to Indiana and to drop her off at her mother’s home, although Lee has been estranged from her for some time. A succession of comic escapades on the long journey is interrupted when Lee is heartlessly cold-shouldered by her mother (Georgia Caine). Jack brings Lee to stay at his mother’s home for the holiday instead. By this point – roughly the halfway point of Remember the Night – Jack and Lee are starting to feel rather differently about each other.
Sturges’s move into directing is thought to have been triggered by increasing frustration with how his screenplays were handled by other directors. Remember the Night includes the odd sequence that suggests distortion of the writer’s intentions. After the Sargent family and their guest have returned from a New Year barn dance, Jack’s mother (Beulah Bondi) comes to Lee’s room. Mrs Sargent is kindly and hospitable but she knows from Jack who Lee really is and fears that her son has fallen in love with a recidivist thief. She explains to Lee how hard Jack has worked to get a legal career, how important it is that his efforts shouldn’t now be spoiled. Although this exchange is well played by Beulah Bondi and Barbara Stanwyck, who makes clear that Lee’s got the painful message, Mitchell Leisen seems anxious to muffle the hard, possessive aspects of the mother’s doing what she’s sure is the right thing. The scene might have been directed by Mrs Sargent. At other times, though, Leisen may have been too respectful of Sturges’s script. The opening courtroom section is much too long because of how much Lee’s attorney, Francis X O’Leary, has to say in his summing up. The joke that he’s a long-winded ham actor doesn’t play: O’Leary’s routine on screen is as boringly unfunny as it is to the exasperated trial judge (Charles Waldron).
Fortunately, there’s plenty of good dialogue elsewhere in the script; and it’s tempting, in view of Sturges’s work as a writer-director, to try and spot obscured subversive elements in Remember the Night. But the film is less unconventional than you might hope from the basic scenario. When the New York court reconvenes in early January, Jack’s feelings for Lee eclipse professional considerations and he tries to throw the trial. Realising what he’s doing, Lee’s impelled – her love for him trumping her immediate self-interest – to plead guilty. The final scene is in a prison cell: Jack is ready to marry Lee on the spot; she insists that he take time to reflect, while she’s inside, on whether he really wants to do that. The film ends in a passionate I-will-wait-for-you embrace not too different from many others that you’ve seen. Except for the above-mentioned scene between Lee and Mrs Sargent, you don’t sense tension between the writing and direction elsewhere in the Indiana episode. The details of domestic routine and pecking order – involving Jack’s mother, his maiden aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson) and genial hayseed cousin Willie (Sterling Holloway) – are witty and well-observed but the emphasis is firmly on celebrating rather than satirising a Midwest family Christmas. This gives rise to some touching as well as amusing moments. Cousin Willie is, for the most part, an obvious cartoon hick: it comes as a surprise when Sterling Holloway reveals a pleasant singing voice (and as a relief from Willie’s comedy yodelling). Aunt Emma helps Lee into an outfit for the New Year dance – it’s the wedding dress that Emma never ended up wearing. The idea is obvious but Elizabeth Patterson’s understated playing makes the scene affecting.
Barbara Stanwyck conveys beautifully Lee’s incredulity at what she’s experiencing at Mrs Sargent’s: Lee is enjoying an unthinkably happy Christmas yet remains always slightly outside the family circle. Stanwyck’s face as Lee watches Jack open his presents is especially expressive – Lee Leander has travelled a long way, emotionally as well as geographically, from the brittle, cynical wisecracker we saw in New York. There’s a point, during the journey to Indiana, at which Jack reminds Lee of her circumstances and she admits that she’d temporarily put them out of her mind. It’s a strength of Barbara Stanwyck’s performance that, in fact, you feel she never does quite forget. It’s a weakness of Remember the Night that amnesia appears to affect Mitchell Leisen and Fred MacMurray. (The film’s title is a puzzle unless it refers to the darkness of the underlying situation.) It’s interesting to see Stanwyck and MacMurray together a few years before their famous pairing in Double Indemnity. MacMurray’s performance in the later film, as a man stupefied by Stanwyck’s femme fatale, works well but his acting limitations are only too apparent in Remember the Night. There’s little distinction between the intellectually agile, verging-on-cocky young lawyer, and the less accomplished, embarrassable, romantic young man. MacMurray is pleasant enough in the on-the-road and Indiana scenes but, as the story builds to its climax, he gives you no sense of collision and conflict between the two sides of Jack Sargent.
10 February 2016
