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There are any number of movies from Hollywood's Golden Era that are now considered holiday classics: It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn, and White Christmas are probably the best known, while pictures such as The Bishop's Wife, Christmas in Connecticut, and The Shop Around the Corner make up the second tier.
One very worthy title has undeservedly been denied Holiday Classic status to date, however, and that's a shame.
Before he began his meteoric rise to fame as a masterful director of classic comedies, Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood's most in-demand screenwriters, penning such classic films as Easy Living, If I Were King, and The Good Fairy.
But the last film Sturges wrote before demanding that Paramount Studios give him his first shot at directing was a lovely picture entitled Remember the Night.
With terrific performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray and a script that is alternately sassy and sentimental, Remember the Night deserves to be in the pantheon of holiday movies, but somehow it remains lesser known than the titles cited above.
Remember the Night concerns a Manhattan DA (MacMurray), who is hesitant to rest his case against a streetwise shoplifter (Stanwyck) in the days just before Christmas, lest she benefit from the seasonal good will of the jury and get off lightly.
So the DA asks for a continuance and ends up, through some entertaining machinations on the part of Sturges, taking the shoplifter with him to spend the holidays with his family in Indiana.
Remember the Night is a very funny, terribly sweet, and plenty smart romantic comedy (or is it a drama? That's the genius of Sturges at work -- it's not a pictures that's easily labeled) that will brighten your holiday season, if you'll only give it a chance.
It's not available on DVD, but Turner Classic Movies is airing it this Sunday, Dec. 17, at 8 p.m. eastern. If you've never seen this lovely film, you owe it to yourself to cancel all plans and plant yourself before the television set (or, at the very least, program your Tivo to record it).
And though Remember the Night manages to avoid the saccharine qualities that can afflict some holiday programming, it's not nearly so tough as the movie that follows it on TCM at 10 p.m. -- the noir classic Double Indemnity, which was directed by the great Billy Wilder and co-written by the equally great Raymond Chandler and which perhaps not so coincidentally also stars Stanwyck and MacMurray.
I heartily recommend this double bill: a little -- but not too much -- holiday humor and romance in Remember the Night leavened thereafter by the gritty dirty dealings of Double Indmentity. TCM rarely screens Remember the Night in December -- I check the listings every year -- and that's exactly when it should be shown.
So here's your chance.
Posted by brett at 01:39 PM | TrackBack