Remember the Night

Stanwyck Shines in Touching Film
Barbara Stanwyck never looked more feminine or gave a more luminous performance than in this touching holiday classic directed by Mitchell Leisen. A fine screenplay from the great Preston Sturges and an excellent supporting cast bolster this sentimental film into a holiday staple you'll watch every Christmas.

Fred MacMurray is Assistant District Attorney John Sargent, charged with prosecuting pretty shoplifter Lee Leander right before the holiday weekend. He uses her defense attorney to wangle a postponement so he can go home to his mom's farm just outside Wabash, Indiana for Christmas. Feeling guilty when Lee reacts badly to being locked up during the holidays, he has an old pal post bail for her.

He brings her to John's place, however, and once the suspicious Lee realizes John had no ulterior motives, Lee confesses she has no place to really go for the holidays. Startled to find her childhood home is just a few miles from Wabash, John decides he can drop her...

Not Even Snowflake Can Ruin This Movie
I loved this movie. That's a hard statement for a black man to make about any movie in which Snowflake has a role. Regrettably, Hollywood had few roles for blacks in the 30s and 40s and the roles it had were generally comic relief and blacks played characters typically happy, subservient and dumb. Snowflake is Fred McMurray's butler and made a few early scenes in the movie very dated. ("He's not too bright, but he makes a great sandwich"). Nevertheless, the movie has a great script and gradually builds where the viewer roots for the improbable pairing to work out. I'm surprised that I've never seen this movie on cable around Christmas because it is truly a Holiday classic.

Sentimental Christmas treat for all to enjoy
"Remember The Night" is a Christmas regular in my home but really it's story could be viewed anytime of the year combining as it does equal portions of humour, family sentiment, goodwill to all men and great acting performances all nicely laced up with an important message about looking for the basic good in all people we encounter in our lives.

Produced in 1940 by Paramount Studios it was the first of two Christmas themed films that Barbara Stanwyck made in the 1940's (the other being the immortal "Christmas In Connecticut" in 1945), that have become holiday season regulars over the decades and live on in people's affections. I know the Christmas season would not be complete without these two wonderful classics as part of our Christmas viewing. Directed by the gifted Mitchell Leisen, a director who is not remembered half as much as he deserves to be, and boasting a superb screenplay by the legendary Preston Sturges, "Remember The Night" tells the...

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