OPENING NIGHT

1940  |  94 mins  |  Rated G

With Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray
Directed by Mitchell Leisen, screenplay by Preston Sturges

Remember the Night is a wonderful comedy classic (rated a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes!), but too rarely seen today.  Stanwyck plays a woman driven by poverty to shoplifting, for which she is arrested.  Her attorney pays her bail and takes her to her home in the mid-west to re-unite with her mother – a woman living in grim Dickensian poverty.  The attorney then takes her to his own family home for Christmas, a move that changes Stanwyck’s life.  A Time Out (London) critic described it as “a winning romantic comedy-drama … a movie of warmth and immense style.”  A Melbourne Cinematheque program note concluded that it is “a luminous film conveying the sentimental gleam of new-found love …  goes well beyond the hide-bound conventions of romantic comedy. … surprisingly complex and unexpectedly moving”.