Remember the Night should have been a great comedy. It was written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen. Three years earlier they had collaborated on Easy Living, one of the classics of the period. But this one is a mess. There’s hardly a trace of Sturges’s sophisticated wit and cynicism, and Leisen’s directing is tone deaf. It could have been otherwise.
The story doesn’t seem Sturgesy, either. Barbara Stanwyck plays Lee, a thief who is apprehended after skedaddling with a bracelet from Tiffany’s. Prosecuting her at her trial is Jack, played by Fred MacMurray, a District Attorney with a reputation for straight and narrow law and order. But he’s eager to get home to his mother in Indiana for Christmas, so he finagles a continuance of the trial until after the holidays. In a piece of mind-numbing illogic (not his, the plot’s) he invites Lee to ride with him pending her trial, so that she can visit her own mother, who also lives in Indiana. Stupid hayseed pastoral complications ensue; and then it turns out Lee’s ice-cold mother wants nothing to do with her. Jack naturally invites Lee — keep in mind, he’s prosecuting her — to spend Christmas with his household, who are as country-kitschy good people as Hollywood can imagine. The couple falls in love, but they have to go back to New York to face the music. Jack drives through Canada, offering Lee a chance to escape, and proposes to her at Niagara Falls. But they are now both too honest to avoid their reckoning. Back in the courtroom, Jack tries to provide an angle that will get her acquitted, but Lee can’t take her reprobate life any more and pleads guilty. She is sent to jail, knowing that Jack will wait for her.
Does any of this sound like Preston Sturges? There are a few moments when his dry sophistication comes out, but they are few. Here, before they hit the road for Hoosierstan, Lee explains why she doesn’t use the kleptomanic defense.
JOHN: How long have you been swiping things?
LEE: Always.
JOHN: Did you ever get caught before?
LEE: Uh huh.
JOHN: Did you take things you didn’t need?
LEE: Sure.
JOHN: In the presence of beautiful things, did you feel a sudden irresistible urge to take them in your hands and hurry away with them?
LEE: You mean, was I hypnotized?
JOHN: No, no. I mean, maybe you’re a kleptomaniac.
LEE: Oh, no, no. They tried that, though. No. You see, to be a kleptomaniac, you can’t sell any of the stuff afterwards, or you, er– You lose your amateur standing.
JOHN: Ah, I don’t understand it. First you think it’s heredity, then you get some guy with several generations of clergymen behind him.
LEE: Oh, I don’t think you ever could understand because your mind is different. Right or wrong is the same for everybody, you see, but the rights and the wrongs aren’t the same. Like in China, they eat dogs.
JOHN: That’s a lot of piffle.
LEE: They do eat dogs!
JOHN: No, no, I mean your theory.
LEE: Well, try out this. Suppose you were starving to death. And you didn’t have any food and you didn’t have any money, and you didn’t have any place to get anything. And there were some loaves of bread out in front of a market, and– Well, now, remember, you’re starving to death. And the man’s back was turned. Would you swipe one?
JOHN: You bet I would.
LEE: (TRIUMPHANT) That’s because you’re honest! You see, I’d have a six course dinner at the table d’hôte across the street, and then say I’d forgotten my purse. Get the difference?
JOHN: Yeah. Your way’s smarter.
LEE: That’s it. We’re smart.
This is promising Sturges stuff. One can imagine the way this should develop: Jack is intrigued by the “smarts” of the professional thief, and Lee is wistful about how “smart” also means “not good.” But this is the last time in the film there’s any smart dialogue. Instead, our protagonists enter The Country and learn about Heartland values. (Remember, they’re both from Indiana, from small towns fifty miles apart.) First it’s the corruption and anti-urban xenophobia of the hicks, when Jack inadvertently drives through a fence onto a farmer’s land and commandeers some cow’s milk straight from the cow.
Then it’s the hardheartedness of icy moralists. But finally, it’s the generosity and hospitality of Good People. Accepted by Jack’s household (but also including a rustic Camille moment between Lee and Jack’s mama), Lee understands what love and kindness are, and determines to change her “smart” ways.
Maybe it’s best to think of Remember the Night as an experiment. Hollywood, like Shakespeare’s London and Aristophanes’s Athens, was always testing how to mix other genres into comedy. Hollywood in the 30s and 40s was fairly successful in mixing comedy and crime stories, and comedy and horror. But they also stubbornly tried to mix comedy and melodrama, and that one’s really hard. So many unfunny comedies of the period begin with snappy gaiety and end up in emotionally excessive sludge. (Comedy depends on audience distance; melodrama on internalization. Romantic comedy walks the tightrope.) And Stanwyck made a lot of those. I think it shows that Stanwyck needed inspired comic directors like Hawks and Sturges to guide her away from the emotional intensity that was (I think) her natural inclination. Leisen couldn’t guide her. Leisen was very popular with his actresses, but the men were not so enthusiastic about him. He let his actresses do what they wished. It worked well with Claudette Colbert in Midnight; but in this film, not so much. Leisen also notoriously altered the scripts he was given, and he admitted in an interview that he cut out lots of Sturges’s speeches. He thought they couldn’t be spoken by the actors. Maybe. So maybe there were enough failures to go around.