Trailer
Plot summary
Jack Sargent, an assistant district attorney in New York City, draws the case against Lee Leander, who is charged with taking a bracelet from a jewelry store. The trial lands in the days before Christmas, and Jack fears a jury softened by the season will acquit her, so he finds a legal pretext to postpone it. Learning that she expects to spend the holiday in a cell, he has a bondsman, Fat Mike, put up her bail. Fat Mike takes the request the wrong way and deposits her at Jack's apartment. Jack finds out that Lee grew up in Indiana and has no one to visit, so he offers to drive her to her mother's house and then continue on to his own family.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Remember the Night (1939)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Mitchell Leisen cut Preston Sturges's script heavily before and during shooting, which so annoyed Sturges that it helped drive him to direct his own scripts, beginning with The Great McGinty.
- During shooting, Preston Sturges told Barbara Stanwyck he would write a screwball comedy for her; The Lady Eve followed a year later, but Stanwyck, then known for dramatic roles, did not believe him.
- Remember the Night finished eight days ahead of schedule and $50,000 under budget, which director Mitchell Leisen credited to Barbara Stanwyck's professionalism; he said she never flubbed a line.
- Sturges drew on his own life: the falling-in-love-on-a-journey plot came from a road trip with Eleanor Post Hutton, and Jack's mother was based on the mother of Sturges's third wife, Louise Sargent.
- Mitchell Leisen shifted the film's focus from Fred MacMurray to Barbara Stanwyck and cut much of the lawyer Jack's dialogue, feeling MacMurray lacked the verbal ability for the heroic speeches Sturges wrote.
- Remember the Night was the first on-screen pairing of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck; they went on to co-star in Double Indemnity (1944), The Moonlighter (1953) and There's Always Tomorrow (1956).
