Remember the Night ( directed by Mitchell Liesen in 1940) finds Stanywyck playing Lee Leander, a shoplifter who gets picked up right before the Christmas holiday. During her preliminary hearing for the crime she meets prosecuting lawyer John Sargent, played by Fred MacMurray. While as a lawyer John is known to be a killer, he turns out to be a pretty nice guy and offers to give Lee a ride home to her family home in Indiana while on the way to his own family's Christmas. Of course, the pair meet up with misadventure on their way from New York to Indiana, and when Lee’s mother rejects her upon her return John offers to take her home to his mother’s for Christmas. All of the warm hospitality of the Sargent family soften Lee and she and John soon fall in love. However, the specter of Lee's post-holiday court date loom heavy. Will John take a dive in the courtroom to help Lee get off? Will Lee let him jepordize his carreer to do it?
The reason that Remember the Night has remained fairly obscure is due to the fact that it does have such a bittersweet finale. MacMurray's character is such a good guy and Stanwyck's has such a jaded past that it is inevitable that a union between the two of them would have more than its share of difficulties. Yet, the scenes of the Sargent family Christmas are quite lovely, and the misadventures that the two expereince on the way home are pretty enduring. It's funny that a few years later Stanwyck and MacMurray would be play cold-blooded killers in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944). Mind you, you can see where their chemistry began. It's also interesting to note that the screenplay was written by Preston Sturges who would go on to direct Stanwyck in The Lady Eve a year later.
Here's the trailer...
