Remember the Night

Remember the Night (1940)

Barbara and Fred in 1940's first great love affair…!

Unexpected love blossoms when an assistant district attorney agrees to take a recidivist shoplifter home so she doesn't have to spend Christmas alone in jail.

Date of release
1940-01-19
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (135)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Comedy, Romance, Drama
Director
Mitchell Leisen

Casting

Interesting facts

Remember the Night is a 1940 American Christmas romantic comedy trial film directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. The film was written by Preston Sturges and was the last of his scripts shot by another director, as Sturges began his own directorial career the same year with The Great McGinty.

Development and production

Preston Sturges suggested Great Love as a title for the film. The script, which blends a number of genres, proved difficult to write, and Sturges joked that it caused him "... to commit hara-kiri several times." As with all of Sturges' scripts, Remember the Night included a number of elements from his own life, including the falling-in-love-on-a-journey motif, inspired by his experience with Eleanor Post Hutton on the road to Palm Beach many year…

Director Mitchell Leisen shortened Sturges' script considerably, both before and during shooting. This annoyed Sturges, and was one of the main reasons fueling his determination to direct his own scripts thereafter, which he did beginning with his next project, The Great McGinty.

Leisen's script alterations shifted the film's focus from MacMurray's character to that of Stanwyck. They also changed the character of Jack in line with MacMurray's strengths; in Sturges' original screenplay, the lawyer was a dashing, articulate and slightly theatrical character, but Leisen felt that MacMurray did not possess the verbal abilities needed for the heroic speeches assigned to his character.

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."

During shooting, Sturges was present on set and came to know Barbara Stanwyck. One day, he told her that he was going to write a screwball comedy for her, which came just a year later, The Lady Eve. Stanwyck later recalled that she did not initially believe Sturges' promise, as she was primarily a dramatic actress known for playing fallen women and femme fatales.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended